Preamble

Tonight, we do not begin with a brother.

We begin with the world the brothers walked.

A world more crowded with thought than perhaps any moment in Islamic history before it.

A world in which a Shi’a scholar in Baghdad could not sit down to write a treatise without knowing that, in another city, in another court, in another tradition, someone else was writing one too — a Mu’tazilite in Rayy, a philosopher in Isfahan, a future Ash’arite at the head of his own seminary in Nishapur.

A world in which the manuscripts circulated faster than the rumours, and the rumours circulated faster than the caravans, and a young scholar in Tus reading Ibn Sina’s Shifa might, in the same week, be reading Sayyed al-Murtadha’s Shafi.

A world that — within a single generation of our two brothers’ deaths — would close.

And it is in the closing of that world, and what was saved from the closing, that the deepest lesson of these two brothers’ lives is finally to be found.

Listen to one short saying — preserved by Sayyed al-Radhi, in the third part of Nahj al-Balagha, from the lips of the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him:

الْعِلْمُ خَيْرٌ مِنَ الْمَالِ ۚ الْعِلْمُ يَحْرُسُكَ، وَأَنْتَ تَحْرُسُ الْمَالَ

“Knowledge is better than wealth. Knowledge guards you, and you must guard wealth.”

— Nahj al-Balaghah, compiled by al-Sharif al-Radhi, Maxim (al-Hikam), Saying 147

Thirteen words.

Wealth requires you to protect it.

Knowledge protects you.

Wealth, when fire comes, burns.

Knowledge, when it has been transmitted to enough hearts, cannot burn — because no fire reaches all of those hearts at once.

The eighty thousand handwritten manuscripts that Sayyed al-Murtadha gathered, and that his student Shaykh al-Tusi inherited, would burn in the year 447 of the Hijra — eleven years after Sayyed al-Murtadha’s death — when the Seljuq Turks took Baghdad and turned the Shi’a flourishing of Karkh into ash.

Eighty thousand volumes.

Reduced to nothing.

And yet — what those manuscripts had carried, what the brothers and their teacher and their students had spent two generations transmitting from heart to heart and city to city — survived.

Because by the year the fire came, the words had already escaped.

Tonight, in this fourth and final session of our journey through the brothers of Baghdad, we walk three movements.

We walk, first, into the intellectual world that surrounded the brothers — a world we have only glimpsed in fragments across the previous sessions, but which deserves a full visit, because the brothers were not isolated scholars.

They were one node in a network of thought that stretched from Bukhara to Aleppo to Cairo, and the texture of that network is the context in which everything they wrote takes its meaning.

We walk, second, to the burning of their inheritance — the Seljuq fires of 447, the library reduced to ash, the student fleeing south to a desert town that would one day be called Najaf — and we ask the question that has been waiting for us since the very first session:

And then we walk, third — and this is the heart of tonight, the heart of the four-week journey, the heart of why we tell this story — to a grave methodological reflection.

Because to understand the brothers honestly, and to understand the closing of their window honestly, we must learn to read history with a particular kind of clarity: a clarity that distinguishes between the genuine theological commitments of believers across traditions, and the political projects, ancient and modern, that have draped themselves in religion’s clothing while serving entirely different masters.

Without that clarity, the story we have just told becomes a sectarian inventory of grievances.

With it, the story becomes what it has always been meant to be — a teaching for the community of the awaiting.

And we will close this four-week journey, by God’s permission, where we have always known it would close: at the graves of the two brothers in Karbala, with our eyes raised toward the One in Whose service they lived and died.

Our beloved Imam.

The Mahdi of this age, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return.

Video of the Majlis (Sermon/Lecture)

Audio of the Majlis (Sermon/Lecture)

Recap

In Session 65, three weeks ago, we met the two brothers as boys — their mother, their father, the dream of Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, peace and blessings be upon her, and the morning Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn walked her two sons to the mosque of al-Karkh and placed them in the hands of Shaykh al-Mufid.

In Session 66, two weeks ago, we walked the full life of the younger brother, Sayyed al-Radhi — Nahj al-Balagha, the Dar al-Ilm founded eighty years before the Nizamiyyah, the three offices held with dignity, the refusal of a thousand dinars from the vizier al-Mahlabi, the refusal to denounce the Fatimids when the Caliph al-Qadir demanded it, his death at forty-seven on the sixth of Muharram 406 of the Hijra, the funeral led by Fakhr al-Mulk because his elder brother could not bear to attend, and the transfer of his body to Karbala beside their father.

Last week, in Session 67, we walked the full life of the elder brother, Sayyed al-Murtadha — the five foundational books of every Hawza in the world, the dream through which Imam Ali, peace and blessings be upon him, gave him the title Alam al-Huda through a sick vizier in 420 AH, the library of eighty thousand handwritten manuscripts opened to every serious seeker, the stipends paid to students out of his own pocket, the Hanbali fire of 422 and his four-word response —

— and the four students he dispatched: Ibn al-Barraj to Tripoli under the Twelver Shi’a Ammarids, Sallar al-Daylami to Aleppo under the Mirdasids, Abu al-Salah al-Halabi as his khalifa — deputy — across the whole of Mirdasid-era greater Syria, and Shaykh al-Tusi held back in Baghdad as his closest disciple and successor.

We walked Sayyed al-Murtadha to his death, on the twenty-fifth of Rabi’ al-Awwal 436 of the Hijra, at the age of eighty years and eight months — al-Najashi present at his deathbed, Sallar al-Daylami assisting, the body initially buried in his Karkh residence and then transferred, like his father and his brother before him, to Karbala, where the three of them — father and two sons — now rest beside the Master of the Martyrs.

Three graves in Karbala.

Eleven years of remaining Buyid protection.

A library of eighty thousand volumes still standing.

A young scholar from Tus, by then already in his fifties, sitting at the head of the seminary in Karkh as the heir to two generations of accumulated work.

That is where we left them last week.

Tonight we step back, before we step forward into the closing of the window — to meet the world that surrounded them all.

The Intellectual Arena

What Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha did — the books, the Dar al-Ilm, the seminary, the students, the dispatching of judges across the Levant — none of it happened in a quiet room.

It happened in what may have been the most intellectually crowded moment in Islamic history to that point.

Let me give you a sense of the stage.

The Contemporary: Ibn Sina

The first figure you must picture, alongside our two brothers, is a man you have certainly heard of.

Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina — known in the Latin West, and through the Latin West to the modern world, as Avicenna.

He was born around the year 980 of the Gregorian calendar (369 AH) — which places his birth twenty-one years after Sayyed al-Radhi’s, and fifteen years after Sayyed al-Murtadha’s.

He was, in the most literal sense, their contemporary.

Let me tell you where Ibn Sina lived, because the geography itself is the story.

And it is a story that connects his life to the same political currents that we have been following all evening.

Ibn Sina was born, as we said, in around the year 980 of the Gregorian calendar, in a village near the great Central Asian city of Bukhara — in what is today the country of Uzbekistan.

And Bukhara at the moment of his birth was the capital of a dynasty that we must introduce properly, because it will not come up again in quite the same way in this sub-series.

The Samanid dynasty — in Persian, Samaniyan — was a Persian Sunni Muslim dynasty of Iranian origin that ruled eastern Iran and Central Asia from the year 819 (approx. 203 AH) of the Gregorian calendar until 999 (approx. 390 AH).

They were originally governors appointed by the Abbasid caliphs, and in time they became effectively independent — while continuing, in the same fashion we have seen with the Buyids of Baghdad, to nominally acknowledge the Abbasid caliph in their sermons and on their coinage.

Their capital at Bukhara was, in the tenth century, one of the great cultural centres of the Islamic world.

The historians tell us that Bukhara under the Samanids rivalled Baghdad — with over four hundred madrasas, great libraries, flourishing trade along the Silk Roads, and a deliberate Samanid policy of reviving Persian language and culture alongside Arabic Islamic scholarship.

The great Persian poets Rudaki and Ferdowsi, the polymath al-Biruni, and Ibn Sina himself were all products, directly or indirectly, of this Samanid cultural flourishing.

And although the Samanids were Sunni, they were known for their tolerance — Twelver Shi’a scholars, including Muhammad ibn Ya’qub al-Kulayni — Shaykh al-Kulayni, whom we met in Session 63, were given freedom to operate in Samanid lands.

Ibn Sina’s father was an administrator in the Samanid government.

Ibn Sina was educated in Bukhara in the full flood of Samanid scholarship — Qur’an by age ten, then jurisprudence, philosophy, medicine, the full curriculum of that extraordinary city.

But the Samanid state was collapsing even as Ibn Sina came of age.

And the story of how it collapsed is worth pausing on, because it is the first appearance in our sub-series of a force that will, within two generations, break the Shi’a flourishing of Baghdad itself.

In the year 999 of the Gregorian calendar — when Ibn Sina was about nineteen — the Samanid realm was torn in two from opposite directions.

From the north, across the river Oxus, came the Qarakhanids.

From the south, out of the mountains of what is today eastern Afghanistan, came the Ghaznavids.

Both were new powers.

Both were Turkic.

Both were Sunni Muslim.

And between them, they ended the Persian Samanid state forever.

Let me tell you briefly who each of these were, because they will matter again before the night is over.

The Qarakhanids — sometimes transliterated as the Karakhanids — were a Turkic dynasty descended from the Qarluq tribal confederation, a group of nomadic Turkic tribes who had dominated the steppes of Central Asia since the decline of the old Uighur Khaganate in the eighth century.

They were originally shamanists, with traces of Buddhism and Nestorian Christianity mixed in — until, around the middle of the tenth century, one of their khans, a man remembered in Turkic tradition as Satuq Bughra Khan, converted to Islam.

His people followed him.

And the Qarakhanids became, in the historical record, the first Turkic people ever to convert en masse to Islam.

Consider the weight of that for a moment.

The story of the Turkic peoples as a dominant Muslim political force in the world — which is the story of every Turkic dynasty from the Seljuqs to the Ottomans to the modern Turkish state — begins with the Qarakhanids.

They captured Bukhara in 999, and their descendants would rule Central Asia for the next two hundred years.

The Ghaznavids, meanwhile, rose from a quite different origin.

They were not a tribal confederation.

They were, in the first instance, former Turkic slave-soldiers — mamluks, in the Arabic — who had served in the army of the very Samanid dynasty they would eventually destroy.

Their founder was a man named Sebüktigin, a Turkic slave soldier who had risen through the Samanid military ranks, married the daughter of a previous governor, and taken control of the small mountain city of Ghazna — in what is today eastern Afghanistan — in the year 977 (367 AH) of the Gregorian calendar.

And it was his son, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, who in 998 (389 AH) inherited the Ghaznavid realm and transformed it into one of the most militarily formidable states of the Islamic world.

Mahmud of Ghazna is a figure you should remember, because his shadow falls on our entire story.

He was a staunch, campaigning, doctrinally committed Sunni Muslim.

He received formal titles and legitimation from the Abbasid caliph al-Qadir in Baghdad — the same al-Qadir, you will recall from Session 66, who had dismissed Sayyed al-Radhi from his offices after the Fatimid poem incident, who privately despised the Shi’a flourishing the Buyids were protecting.

And Mahmud of Ghazna made himself, in return, the sword of Sunni orthodoxy in the eastern Islamic world.

He campaigned against the Isma’ili Shi’a of Multan in India.

He campaigned against the Twelver Shi’a Buyids in Persia.

And in the year 1029 (420 AH) of the Gregorian calendar — just seven years before Sayyed al-Murtada’s death — Mahmud of Ghazna marched west, defeated the Buyid prince Majd al-Dawla in Rayy, and annexed the whole of northern Persia into his Sunni empire.

Think about what that means for our story.

While Sayyed al-Murtadha sat in Baghdad writing al-Shafi fi al-Imamah and teaching the generation of Shaykh al-Tusi, the Buyid realm at the eastern edge of his world was being eaten away by a militantly Sunni Turkic power that explicitly understood itself as the enemy of what the Buyids had built.

Ibn Sina himself — the very philosopher we have been following — had his library plundered by Mahmud’s successor Mas’ud when the Ghaznavids briefly occupied Isfahan, and that portion of it was carried off to Ghazna and eventually destroyed.

The Ghaznavid rise — and behind it, the rise of all Turkic Sunni military power in the eastern Islamic world — was the first rumble of the storm that would, within a generation, bring the Seljuqs into Baghdad itself and close the Shi’a window of our story.

So when we say that the Samanid state was torn apart in 999 of the Gregorian calendar — and that Ibn Sina was forced to become a traveller as a result — we are not telling a story about one young man losing his patron.

We are telling the opening chapter of the story we have spent this whole sub-series telling: the transition from Persian and Arab Shi’a dynasties protecting Islamic scholarship, to Turkic Sunni dynasties displacing them.

Ibn Sina lived the opening movement of that transition.

Our two brothers, a few years later, lived its middle movement in Baghdad.

And Shaykh al-Tusi, a few decades after that, would live its closing movement — and be forced to flee Baghdad altogether for the desert town of Najaf.

But all of that was still to come.

For now, in the year 999 (390 AH), the nineteen-year-old Ibn Sina had to find a new patron.

Ibn Sina, like many scholars of his generation, had to become a traveller.

He moved westward, through a succession of patrons and courts.

First to Khwarazm.

Then to Jurjan near the Caspian Sea, where his future biographer Juzjani first met him.

Then, from around 1014 (404 AH) onwards, into the Buyid-ruled Persian heartland — the same Shi’a Daylamite dynasty we have been speaking about through this sub-series, but here we must clarify something that is often missed.

The Buyids did not rule their domain as a single unit.

By Ibn Sina’s time, the three sons of Buya had divided the realm into three branches: the Buyids of Iraq, based in Baghdad — the patrons of Shaykh al-Mufid and our two brothers; the Buyids of Fars, based in Shiraz; and the Buyids of Jibal and Rayy, based in the Persian interior.

These three branches cooperated sometimes and fought each other sometimes, in the fashion of all dynasties with multiple heirs.

And it was into the domain of the third branch — the Buyids of Jibal — that Ibn Sina moved.

He served as court physician to Majd al-Dawla, the Buyid prince of Rayy, and then as vizier — that is to say, prime minister — to Shams al-Dawla, the Buyid prince of Hamadan, the city in western Iran that was then one of the three great Buyid capitals.

For six years, Ibn Sina was, quite literally, running the government of a Buyid Shi’a Persian city-state, while composing some of the most important works of philosophy and medicine in the Islamic tradition in whatever hours of the day his duties left him.

And here a third dynasty enters our story.

When Shams al-Dawla died in 1021, and the Buyid succession in Hamadan became unstable, Ibn Sina was eventually forced to flee.

He was imprisoned for four months in a fortress outside Hamadan.

And when he was released, he escaped — disguised as a Sufi ascetic, along with his brother, his student Juzjani, and two slaves — across the mountains to the court of a new patron in Isfahan.

That new patron was Ala al-Dawla Muhammad — the amir of Isfahan. And his dynasty was the Kakuyids.

Now, the Kakuyids deserve their introduction, because they turn out to be something rather remarkable.

The Kakuyids were a Shi’a Muslim dynasty of Daylamite origin — from the same mountains south of the Caspian Sea that had produced the Buyids themselves a century earlier.

The founder of the dynasty, Ala al-Dawla Muhammad, was actually the cousin of the powerful Buyid queen-mother Sayyedah Shirin — his family was related by blood and marriage to the Buyid royal house.

He had begun his career as a Buyid governor of Isfahan around 1008 (398 AH).

And as the northern Buyid realm weakened, he had steadily built Isfahan into his own semi-independent Shi’a emirate, while remaining nominally loyal to the Buyids — exactly the pattern we have seen again and again in these years of Shi’a flourishing.

In other words: when Ibn Sina escaped Hamadan in 1024 (414 AH) and fled to Isfahan, he did not pass out of the Shi’a Daylamite world at all.

He passed from the Buyid branch into its Kakuyid cousin.

The same Shi’a political ecosystem that protected Shaykh al-Mufid and Sayyed al-Murtadha in Baghdad was, in different branches, protecting the greatest philosopher of the age in the Persian interior.

Ala al-Dawla, the Kakuyid amir, was — by all accounts — one of the most cultured patrons of his age.

The historians tell us that he held weekly academic gatherings at his court every Thursday evening.

He gave Ibn Sina the peace and the resources to complete his greatest works.

Ibn Sina dedicated his major Persian philosophical work, the Danishnama-yi ʿAla’i — The Book of Knowledge for Ala al-Dawla — to him in gratitude.

And it was in Ala al-Dawla’s service, accompanying him on a military campaign to Hamadan, that Ibn Sina died in 1037 of the Gregorian calendar — one year after Sayyed al-Murtadha’s own death in 436 of the Hijra.

So when we speak of Ibn Sina as a contemporary of our two brothers — we are not speaking of two men who happened to be alive at the same time in distant corners of the world.

We are speaking of two scholarly lives lived inside the same Shi’a political canopy, under cousin dynasties of Daylamite origin, flourishing in the same golden window — the window that the Seljuqs were about to close.

These were not two separate worlds.

These were two rooms of the same house.

Think about that.

Sayyed al-Murtadha, in Baghdad, leading the Shi’a seminary, dispatching his khalifa to Aleppo, compiling the five foundational texts of the Hawza — was a close contemporary of Ibn Sina, writing the Qanun fi al-Tibb — The Canon of Medicine and the Kitab al-Shifa — The Book of Healing — sometimes known as The Cure — in Hamadan and Isfahan, under the patronage of Buyid princes connected to the same dynasty that protected Baghdad’s Shi’a.

These were not two separate worlds.

These were two rooms of the same house.

Ibn Sina’s Kitab al-Shifa — The Cure — was not a medical book, despite its title.

It was a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, modelled on the corpus of Aristotle, covering logic, natural sciences, mathematics, and metaphysics.

His al-Qanun fi al-Tibb — The Canon of Medicine — would, in its later Latin translation, become the standard medical textbook in European universities for nearly six hundred years, taught in Paris and Bologna and Padua until the year 1650 of the Gregorian calendar.

And our brothers in Baghdad sat at the scholarly centre of the network through which his ideas flowed.

Ibn Sina was not formally a student of Sayyed al-Murtadha, and Sayyed al-Murtadha was not formally a student of Ibn Sina.

They belonged to different branches of Islamic intellectual life — Ibn Sina to the falsafa tradition, the Islamic-Aristotelian philosophical tradition descending from al-Kindi and al-Farabi; Sayyed al-Murtadha to the kalam tradition, the Islamic theological tradition that engaged philosophy but did not simply inherit it.

But they knew of each other.

The texts circulating in Ibn Sina’s Isfahan circulated in Sayyed al-Murtadha’s Baghdad.

The students who travelled the Buyid trade routes carried manuscripts in both directions.

What it meant to be a Shi’a scholar in the early fifth century of the Hijra was to be operating in the same intellectual universe as Ibn Sina.

Not as a rival.

Not as an ally.

But as a neighbour, whose arguments you had to have taken seriously, whose books you had to have read, whose categories you had to engage — or be left behind.

Our brothers did not shrink from that universe.

They walked into it.

The Interlocutor: Qadi Abd al-Jabbar and the Mu’tazila

The second figure you must picture is closer to Baghdad — and closer to Sayyed al-Murtadha personally.

Qadi Abd al-Jabbar ibn Ahmad al-Hamadani, who died in the year 415 of the Hijra — nine years after Sayyed al-Radhi and twenty-one years before Sayyed al-Murtadha — was the greatest theologian of the Mu’tazila school in the early fifth century.

The Mu’tazila, you will recall from Session 64 on Shaykh al-Mufid, were the great rationalist school of Islamic theology — the scholars who insisted that reason must precede revelation in the ordering of religious knowledge, that the Qur’an was created rather than eternal, that God’s justice required human free will, that anthropomorphic readings of scripture must be metaphorically interpreted.

They had been, at their peak two centuries earlier under the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun, the official theological school of the caliphate itself.

By our brothers’ time they had lost that official position, but they remained one of the most intellectually formidable forces in Islamic thought.

And Qadi Abd al-Jabbar was their champion.

He served as the chief judge of Rayy — the Persian city near modern Tehran — under the Buyid vizier al-Sahib ibn ʿAbbad.

He wrote a vast theological encyclopedia titled al-Mughni fi Abwab al-Tawhid wa al-ʿAdl — The Sufficient in the Matters of Divine Unity and Justice — running to twenty volumes.

It was the most comprehensive statement of Mu’tazilite theology ever written.

And within it, in its volume on the Imamate, he mounted a sustained Mu’tazilite-Sunni critique of the Shi’a doctrine of the imamate.

And Sayyed al-Murtadha — from his seminary in Baghdad — answered him.

He wrote al-Shafi fi al-Imamah — The Healing, on the Imamate — which was a direct, point-by-point refutation of Qadi Abd al-Jabbar’s volume.

Al-Shafi — the Healer, or the Sufficient-that-Cures — positioned deliberately against al-Mughni, the Sufficient.

The titles themselves spoke to each other across the distance between Baghdad and Rayy.

It is one of the most famous textual duels in Islamic intellectual history.

What is striking — and what tells us something about our brothers’ whole posture — is that Sayyed al-Murtadha did not refuse to engage with Qadi Abd al-Jabbar.

He did not declare Mu’tazilite theology forbidden territory.

He did not walk away.

He read the twenty volumes of al-Mughni carefully, identified the Imamate section as the point of greatest disagreement, and wrote a response that engaged Qadi Abd al-Jabbar’s arguments on their own terms — using the Mu’tazilite categories of rational proof, the Mu’tazilite commitment to reason, the Mu’tazilite vocabulary of divine justice — and turned those very tools back against Qadi Abd al-Jabbar’s conclusions on the Imamate.

This is the signature of Sayyed al-Murtadha’s scholarship.

He did not build walls.

He walked through doors.

The Rising Tide: The Ash’ariyya

The third figure on the stage was not a single man but a school — and it was rising at precisely the moment our brothers were flourishing.

The Ash’ariyya — the theological school founded by Abu al-Hasan al-Ash’ari, who died in the year 324 of the Hijra, about thirty years before our brothers were born — had been growing steadily through the fourth century of the Hijra.

Al-Ash’ari had himself been a Mu’tazilite in his early career — and the story of how he broke from Mu’tazilism is worth telling, because it captures something essential about the intellectual world our two brothers were navigating.

Al-Ash’ari had studied for decades under Abu Ali al-Jubba’i, the greatest Mu’tazilite theologian of his generation and the head of the Mu’tazilite school in Basra.

He had lived in al-Jubba’i’s household.

He had become his most prominent disciple.

He had himself become an imam of the Mu’tazila — one of its recognised teachers.

And then, according to the classical accounts, he put a question to his teacher.

He asked al-Jubba’i about three brothers.

The first had lived a pious life and died a righteous man.

The second had lived a sinful life and died a wicked man.

The third had died in infancy, before reaching the age of moral responsibility.

What, teacher, al-Ash’ari asked, is the fate of each of them?

Al-Jubba’i replied, according to the standard Mu’tazilite view, that the first brother would be rewarded in paradise, the second punished in hell, and the third placed in a neutral intermediate station — for he had neither earned reward nor committed sin.

But teacher, al-Ash’ari pressed, what if the third brother — the infant — were to say to God:

Al-Jubba’i replied that God would answer:

But teacher, al-Ash’ari pressed further, what then of the second brother — the one who lived and was condemned? Could he not say:

And al-Jubba’i, the greatest Mu’tazilite theologian of his age, could not answer coherently.

The biographical sources tell us that al-Ash’ari then disappeared from public life for fifteen days of private seclusion.

And then he walked into the Great Mosque of Basra, climbed the pulpit in front of the congregation, and publicly renounced Mu’tazilism.

It is one of the most famous public intellectual conversions in the entire history of Islamic thought — a man at the height of his scholarly authority, tearing down, in a single sermon, the school he had spent forty years helping to build.

The school he founded positioned itself as a theological middle way — accepting the rational methods of kalam, but pulling back from some of the Mu’tazila’s boldest rationalist conclusions, particularly around the createdness of the Qur’an and the limits of reason in matters of divine attributes.

And in our brothers’ time, the Ash’ariyya was in the process of becoming what it would be for the next thousand years: the dominant theological school of Sunni Islam.

It had a particular strength in the cities of the Persian east — in Nishapur, in Tus (where Shaykh al-Tusi was born) — and it was steadily displacing both older Hanbalite literalism and older Mu’tazilite rationalism across Sunni intellectual life.

Our brothers did not live to see the full rise of the Ash’ariyya to dominance.

That would come in the generation after them.

But they lived in the moment when it was becoming clear what was happening.

And Sayyed al-Murtadha, in his theological writings, engaged Ash’arite arguments as carefully as he engaged Mu’tazilite ones.

Tanzih al-Anbiya’ wa al-A’imma — his treatise on the infallibility of the Prophets and Imams — had to contend with both Mu’tazilite and Ash’arite understandings of what prophethood required.

Al-Dhakhira fi ʿIlm al-Kalam — his treatise on theology — surveyed the whole theological landscape of his age and positioned the Shi’a on that landscape with intellectual rigour.

The Shadow Ahead: al-Ghazali

And finally — and this is the most poignant detail of the stage our brothers walked — we must name a man who was not yet born when they died, but whose shadow already stretched towards them.

Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali was born in the year 450 of the Hijra — fourteen years after Sayyed al-Murtadha’s death.

He would grow up in the Persian city of Tus.

He would be trained at the Nizamiyyah madrasa in Nishapur — the Sunni institutional network founded, we must remember, by the Seljuq vizier Nizam al-Mulk deliberately to counter the Shi’a scholarly flourishing we have been discussing all night.

He would rise to become the greatest Sunni theologian of his age, and perhaps the most influential single Sunni theologian of the entire medieval period.

And he would write, in 1091 (484 AH) of the Gregorian calendar — fifty-five years after Sayyed al-Murtadha’s death — Tahafut al-Falasifa — The Incoherence of the Philosophers — a work that would, within a generation, decisively turn the Sunni theological mainstream away from the Aristotelian philosophical tradition of Ibn Sina.

Our brothers did not know al-Ghazali.

Al-Ghazali did not know them.

But the intellectual world al-Ghazali would reshape was the intellectual world our brothers had inherited.

The Shi’a scholarship our brothers built — rational, philosophically engaged, committed to kalam and falsafa as legitimate tools — would, in al-Ghazali’s reshaping of Sunni thought, come to look increasingly distinctive.

Not by changing itself.

But because the Sunni mainstream, under al-Ghazali’s influence, would move in the opposite direction — pulling back from philosophical engagement in a way that the Shi’a tradition, holding to the path Sayyed al-Murtadha had laid down, never would.

This is part of why the Shi’a and Sunni intellectual traditions, which in Sayyed al-Murtadha’s time still shared so much common theological vocabulary and so many common philosophical references, would become, over the following centuries, progressively more distinct.

Our brothers were standing at the last moment when the shared intellectual universe of Islamic theology was still fully shared.

And they built into their tradition — into al-Dhakhira, into al-Shafi, into Tanzih al-Anbiya’, into the teaching in the Dar al-Ilm — a commitment to philosophical engagement that would outlast the Sunni retreat.

The Hawza that teaches Ibn Sina’s philosophy today — that reads al-Isharat wa al-Tanbihat as a standard text, that treats Mulla Sadra — who we will meet in a future session, God willing — and the School of Isfahan as its own heritage, that produces scholars who move fluidly between fiqh and falsafa — that Hawza exists because two brothers in eleventh-century Baghdad decided that the answer to the crowded intellectual stage of their time was not to build walls around it, but to walk through every door.

Lessons Woven In

Let me draw out what this means for us.

We live, in our own age, in an intellectually crowded moment.

We live in an age where, on every platform we open, on every screen, in every classroom our children walk into, in every bookshop and every podcast and every social media feed, ideologies compete for the hearts and minds of the believers.

Secular atheism, new-age spirituality, consumerist individualism, political ideologies of every stripe, revisionist readings of Islam that would hollow out its core, shallow readings of Islam that would reduce it to slogans, hostile readings of Islam that would caricature it into something no Muslim would recognise.

The temptation — the constant temptation — is to retreat.

To build walls.

To circle the wagons.

To declare the intellectual arena of our age haram territory, enter it at your peril, read nothing that is not already from within our tradition.

And when you hear that temptation whispered — in a lecture, in a Friday sermon, in the advice an elder gives a young Muslim going off to university — remember our two brothers.

Remember Sayyed al-Radhi, reading the Diwan of Abu Tamam in a world where poetry was already becoming suspect in some pious circles — and writing his own Diwan, and using the same poetic tools that his non-Muslim and non-Shi’a contemporaries were using, and turning them to the service of the Ahl al-Bayt.

Remember Sayyed al-Murtadha, sitting down with the twenty volumes of Qadi Abd al-Jabbar’s al-Mughni, reading every page, understanding every argument, engaging every category — and then answering, from within that shared philosophical vocabulary, in a way that a Mu’tazilite critic was forced to take seriously.

Remember the Dar al-Ilm, where Shi’a, Sunni, Mu’tazili, and even non-Muslim scholars sat in the same classroom and studied the same texts.

Our tradition — the tradition of the Ahl al-Bayt — has never feared engagement.

It has never needed to.

Because it has always known that Truth does not lose when it meets other claims in open argument.

Truth loses only when those entrusted with it retreat into silence.

The scholars of this Ummah who shaped our intellectual inheritance did not hide from the intellectual challenges of their age.

They walked into them, and they answered them, and they won the respect of their interlocutors precisely because they came prepared.

But let me add one thing — and it is a thing that matters more, perhaps, in our age than in any age before it.

Engagement is not the same as aggression.

When our two brothers wrote against Qadi Abd al-Jabbar, they did not mock him.

They did not abuse him.

They did not reduce him to a caricature of his own positions.

Sayyed al-Murtadha read al-Mughni carefully, honestly, in good faith — he represented his interlocutor’s arguments in their strongest form, and only then did he answer them.

This is the standard the tradition sets.

The Qur’an itself commands us:

ادْعُ إِلَىٰ سَبِيلِ رَبِّكَ بِالْحِكْمَةِ وَالْمَوْعِظَةِ الْحَسَنَةِ وَجَادِلْهُم بِالَّتِي هِيَ أَحْسَنُ

“Invite to the way of your Lord with wisdom and beautiful preaching, and argue with them in ways that are best and most gracious.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Nahl (the Chapter of the Bee), #16, Verse 125

Not merely in a way that is effective.

Not merely in a way that wins.

In the way that is ahsan — the most beautiful.

The Qur’an does not permit us to choose between being right and being gracious.

It commands us to be both.

And this is the way of every honourable scholar of the Ahl al-Bayt, past, present, and — God willing — future.

The great scholars of our tradition did not win their interlocutors’ respect by shouting.

They won it by understanding.

They did not humiliate their opponents.

They answered them.

And in answering them with care, with dignity, with accuracy, with grace — they elevated the entire conversation.

In our own age, we have inherited platforms that can amplify our voices across the world in seconds.

We can argue with strangers at three in the morning.

We can mock.

We can caricature.

We can dehumanise with a single clip, a single quote taken out of context, a single insult landed in front of thousands.

And too many of our own, carrying the name of the Ahl al-Bayt on their tongues, have done exactly this — confusing cruelty for conviction, confusing mockery for manhood, confusing the volume of their voices for the weight of their arguments.

This is not the way of our brothers.

This is not the way of our tradition.

When you engage — and you must engage — engage with the honour of those who walked before you.

Represent your opponent’s view fairly.

Understand it before you answer it.

Speak the truth plainly, but never cruelly.

Do not humiliate a person to win a point.

Do not score victories at the cost of another’s dignity.

The Commander of the Faithful, Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, whose words our two brothers gathered and preserved for us in Nahj al-Balagha, said it plainly:

النَّاسُ صِنْفَانِ: إِمَّا أَخٌ لَكَ فِي الدِّينِ، أَوْ نَظِيرٌ لَكَ فِي الْخَلْقِ

“People are of two kinds: either a brother to you in faith, or your equal in creation.”

— Nahj al-Balagha, Letter 53 (the Letter to Malik al-Ashtar)

Every interlocutor you meet — even the one who disagrees with you most fundamentally — is either your brother in faith or your equal in creation.

There is no third category.

There is no category in which cruelty becomes permissible.

So engage.

But engage as our two brothers engaged.

With rigour, with preparation, with depth — and with the dignity that the tradition of the Ahl al-Bayt has always demanded of those who carry its name.

This is the inheritance.

This is the command.

Engage.

Read.

Understand.

Answer.

Do not retreat.

And may God grant us the wisdom, the courage, the rigour, and the humility to walk in their footsteps.

The Library That Would Burn

But the story of their legacy does not end at their graves.

Because the most dramatic chapter of what the two brothers built was still to come.

When Sayyed al-Murtadha died, his library of eighty thousand volumes passed, along with his leadership of the community, to his greatest student — Shaykh al-Tusi.

And Shaykh al-Tusi, for the next eleven years, continued teaching in Baghdad under the last of the Buyid protection, adding his own works — including two of the Four Books of Hadith — to the library his master had built.

And then, in the year 447 of the Hijra — just eleven years after Sayyed al-Murtadha’s death — the Seljuq Turks, the successors we have been foreshadowing all night, conquered Baghdad.

And the Seljuqs, who were militantly Sunni and explicitly hostile to the Shi’a flourishing that the Buyids had protected, unleashed on Karkh a wave of violence more devastating than anything the Hanbali riots had ever produced.

Shaykh al-Tusi’s house was attacked.

His library — the inheritance of Sayyed al-Murtadha’s library, built over nearly a century of careful acquisition — was burned to the ground.

Shaykh al-Tusi himself escaped with his life and a handful of manuscripts, and fled Baghdad forever, eventually settling in the desert town of Najaf, beside the shrine of the Commander of the Faithful, where he would plant the seed of the Hawza that still teaches there today.

Eighty thousand volumes.

Reduced to ash.

And here is the detail that matters for tonight.

The sources do not tell us, specifically, what was inside those eighty thousand volumes.

We know there were classical hadith collections.

We know there were works of philosophy, kalam, poetry, grammar, medicine.

We know Sayyed al-Murtadha had been copying and preserving manuscripts for over fifty years.

And when the Seljuq fires finally extinguished it all, a silence fell across a great swathe of the Shi’i scholarly inheritance that can never now be recovered.

Works of Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha themselves were lost.

Volumes of Sayyed al-Radhi’s own Qur’anic commentary, Haqa’iq al-Ta’wil — of which only a single chapter survives — were most likely in that library.

Letters, poems, treatises, drafts, correspondences — all gone.

The Book That Could Not Burn

But there was one book that the Seljuq fires could not reach.

Because by the year 447 of the Hijra, Nahj al-Balagha had already escaped Baghdad.

It had been copied.

And copied.

And copied again.

Students who had sat in the Dar al-Ilm had carried copies home with them — to Tripoli, to Aleppo, to Damascus, to Rayy, to Qom.

Ibn al-Barraj had a copy in Tripoli.

Abu al-Salah had a copy in Aleppo.

Every scholar who had passed through Baghdad for two decades had carried a piece of Nahj al-Balagha out with him into the wider Muslim world.

By the time the Seljuqs burned Karkh, Nahj al-Balagha was no longer in Karkh.

It was everywhere.

It was in the hands of every serious student of the Ahl al-Bayt across the Mediterranean and across the Persian world.

You cannot burn a book that has already been dispersed.

And this, is perhaps the deepest lesson of the two brothers’ legacy.

Because when they built their library, they were not hoarding treasure — they were cultivating a seed bank.

Every manuscript they lent, every copy they funded, every student they sent to the Levant with scrolls in his saddlebag — each of these was a grain planted in soil the Seljuqs could not reach.

The library burned.

The inheritance did not.

Because the inheritance had already been scattered to places where fire could not find it.

This is how a scholarly tradition survives the closing of its window.

Not by hoarding.

By giving.

A Word on Why We Tell This Story

Before we turn to our final eulogy — let me pause, because something important needs to be said, and it needs to be said plainly.

Across these four sessions, we have spent a great deal of time talking about dynasties.

The Abbasids.

The Buyids.

The Fatimids.

The Ammarids of Tripoli.

The Hamdanids and Mirdasids of Aleppo.

The Samanids of Bukhara.

The Qarakhanids.

The Ghaznavids.

The Kakuyids of Isfahan.

And, looming at the edge of tonight’s story, the Seljuqs who will dominate the next few sessions of this sub-series.

We have spoken about which of these were Shi’a and which were Sunni.

We have spoken about Shi’a flourishing under Shi’a dynasties, and Shi’a scholarship being threatened when those dynasties fell.

And I want to be absolutely clear about why we speak this way — because it would be catastrophically easy, and catastrophically wrong, to walk away from this four-week journey thinking that the story of our tradition is a story of Shi’a versus Sunni.

It is not.

Let me say that again, because it matters.

The story of our tradition is not Shi’a versus Sunni.

It never has been.

And the great scholars of our school — past, present, and God willing, future — have never permitted that framing to stand.

This series — this whole sub-series on the Architecture of Guidance, and the wider series of which it is a part — stands in the tradition of the Martyr Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei’s Insan-e 250 Saleh — The 250-Year-Old Person — which reads the lives of the fourteen Infallibles not as a list of biographies but as a single continuous human life, unfolding across two and a half centuries against the shifting political and social and intellectual conditions of each age.

That is the kind of history we are trying to do here.

Socio-political-theological history.

Not a list of kings and their dates.

Not a scoreboard of Shi’a victories and Sunni defeats.

But an attempt to read the history of our tradition the way the Qur’an asks us to read history — as a set of ayat, signs, from which the believer extracts understanding, so that the community that inherits this history can see its own present clearly.

And when we do that — when we read honestly — we see something that the simplistic “Shi’a versus Sunni” framing cannot see.

We see Sayyed al-Murtadha writing a twenty-volume answer to Qadi Abd al-Jabbar the Mu’tazilite — and doing so with respect, engaging the arguments, never mocking the man.

We see Sayyed al-Radhi compiling Nahj al-Balagha and dedicating it to the whole Ummah — so successfully that within two centuries the Sunni Mu’tazilite Ibn Abi al-Hadid was writing a twenty-volume commentary on it from within his own tradition.

We see the Sunni judge Ibn Khallikan of Damascus preserving the narration of the Alam al-Huda dream in his Wafayat al-A’yan, without polemic, without dismissal, because the story was worth preserving.

We see students in the Dar al-Ilm — Shi’a, Sunni, Mu’tazilite, and yes, even non-Muslim — sitting together and reading the same texts.

We see Fakhr al-Mulk, the vizier of the Abbasid caliph, stepping in to lead the funeral prayer over Sayyed al-Radhi’s body when his own brother could not bear to.

This is not a story of sectarian warfare.

This is a story of a community of faith engaging, respectfully, with other communities of faith — and being engaged with, respectfully, in return.

So when we speak of the Seljuqs, or of the Ghaznavids before them, as powers whose conquest threatened the Shi’a flourishing — we are not speaking about ordinary Sunni Muslims.

The Turkic peasants who cultivated the fields of Khurasan under Seljuq rule were not our enemies.

The Hanafi scholars who taught in the madrasas of Nishapur were not our enemies.

The ordinary pious Sunni believers of eleventh-century Baghdad — our neighbours, our trading partners, the men and women who bought bread from the same bakers we did — were not our enemies.

The problem, when there was a problem, was almost never theology.

The problem was power.

When dynasties — any dynasties, of any sect — set about consolidating their political authority, they have historically used whatever ideological tools were available to them to legitimise that consolidation.

If the tool ready to hand was anti-Shi’a rhetoric, they used that.

If the tool was anti-Sunni rhetoric, they used that.

If the tool was anti-Mu’tazilite, or anti-Sufi, or anti-philosophical, or anti-scholarly in general — they used that.

The driving force was not the theology.

The driving force was the power.

Let me give you a contemporary example, because it will clarify everything.

In the year 1802 of the Gregorian calendar — just over two centuries ago — the First Saudi State, under the rule of the Wahhabi movement, marched on the city of Karbala.

They killed thousands of civilians.

They destroyed the dome over the shrine of Imam Husayn.

They plundered the treasury of the shrine and carried off four thousand camel-loads of wealth.

And a little over a century later, in April of 1925 of the Gregorian calendar, the third Saudi State, after conquering the Hejaz, levelled the sacred cemetery of Jannat al-Baqi in Medina — the resting place of Imam al-Hasan, Imam al-Sajjad, Imam al-Baqir, and Imam al-Sadiq, peace be upon them all — reducing the shrines of the Ahl al-Bayt to bare earth where no marker stands to this day.

These are among the most painful episodes in modern Shi’a memory.

And it would be the easiest thing in the world to narrate them as Sunni crimes against the Shi’a.

But that narration would be a lie.

Because the overwhelming majority of Sunni Muslims — of every school, across the entire world — were horrified by these acts.

The Ottoman ulama, the Sunni jurists of Baghdad, the scholars of al-Azhar in Cairo, Sunni communities from Damascus to Delhi — condemned these acts when they happened.

They were not Sunni crimes.

They were the crimes of a particular political project that was using a particular narrow theological justification to consolidate its hold over the Arabian peninsula.

The modern scholarly consensus is clear on this point: the destruction at Karbala and al-Baqi was, at its core, a political act — an act of establishing the authority of a new state, using theology as the instrument of that authority, rather than the reverse.

The First Parallel: Christian Zionism and the Scofield Project

In the year 1909 of the Gregorian calendar — just over a century ago — a man named Cyrus Ingerson Scofield, an American lawyer and convert to a particular strand of evangelical Christianity, published, with the backing of Oxford University Press and the financial support of a circle of wealthy patrons, a work that he titled the Scofield Reference Bible.

The Scofield Reference Bible was not a new translation of the Christian scriptures.

It was the traditional King James Bible, printed in its familiar form, but accompanied — on every single page — by Scofield’s own extensive annotations and footnotes.

And those footnotes advanced a particular theological framework called dispensationalism — a framework that, among many other teachings, held that the return of the Jewish people to the land of Palestine was a prophetic precondition for the Second Coming of Christ, and that support for the establishment and defence of a modern Jewish state in that land was therefore a Christian religious duty.

The Scofield Bible sold more than two million copies by the end of the Second World War.

It became the single most influential study Bible in American evangelical Christianity.

And it is the theological engine — more than any other single source — of what we now call Christian Zionism: the movement of tens of millions of American evangelical Christians who today provide theological, political, and financial support for the “State of Israel” precisely because they have been taught, through Scofield’s footnotes and their descendants, that such support is a Christian religious obligation.

Now, I am not asking you to adjudicate the theology of Scofield’s footnotes tonight.

What I am asking you to notice is the mechanism.

A political project — in this case, the establishment of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine — required religious legitimation to mobilise mass support.

A theological framework was found, selectively amplified, and popularised.

And a generation of ordinary Christian believers — who themselves were not politically motivated, who were simply reading their Bible in good faith and trusting the footnotes printed alongside the text — were recruited, often without their clear awareness, into supporting a political project that would, over the subsequent decades, contribute to the displacement and suffering of millions of Palestinians — including Palestinian Christians themselves, who share the faith of their evangelical American brethren, and whose presence in the Holy Land stretches back to the time of Christ, peace be upon him and may God hasten his return.

The theology was the cloak.

The political project was the body underneath.

The Second Parallel: Zionism and Judaism

And this brings us to the most important distinction of all — the distinction between Judaism and Zionism.

Judaism, is a religion.

It is one of the great monotheistic traditions of humanity.

It traces its origins to the Prophet Abraham, peace and blessings be upon him, who is also our father in faith.

Its scriptures preserve revelations given to Prophets whom we Muslims revere — Moses, David, Solomon, peace be upon them all.

Its ethical traditions shaped the moral imagination of the ancient world and continue to shape it today.

The Jewish people are the descendants of those who received these revelations, and they have, across millennia, suffered persecutions and expulsions and genocides — most catastrophically, within living memory, the Holocaust in Europe in the twentieth century — that no Muslim with a heart can fail to mourn.

Zionism is something different.

Zionism is a political movement, founded in the late nineteenth century of the Gregorian calendar, primarily through the work of a secular Austrian-Hungarian journalist named Theodor Herzl — a man who was not particularly religious, who wrote explicitly that the project he was advancing was a political project for a Jewish national homeland, not a religious one.

Zionism took the immense and genuine suffering of the Jewish people across centuries of European persecution — real suffering, suffering that demands acknowledgement — and channelled that suffering into a territorial project: the establishment of a Jewish state, eventually in the land of Palestine, at the cost of the displacement of the Palestinian people who had lived on that land for centuries.

And the theological cloak that dresses this political project — the claim that a particular understanding of biblical promises justifies the dispossession of one people by another — is precisely the same mechanism we have just described with Scofield, and the same mechanism we have described with the Wahhabi sack of Karbala.

And here, is the crucial point:

— Jewish scholars, rabbis, communities, and movements who hold firmly that Zionism is not Judaism, that political statehood is not a religious commandment, that the land does not belong to any nation but to God, and that a genuine Jewish faithfulness requires rejecting, not embracing, the use of religious scripture to justify the displacement of another people.

These Jewish voices exist.

They have always existed.

And they deserve to be heard — because when they speak against Zionism, they are not speaking against their own tradition.

They are speaking from their own tradition.

They are doing, within Judaism, exactly what our own scholars have done within Islam for a thousand years: refusing to let political power clothe itself in the garments of revelation.

To confuse Zionism with Judaism is to make the same mistake as confusing Wahhabism with Islam.

Both confusions are wrong.

Both confusions hurt ordinary believers — Jewish and Muslim alike — who are then blamed for political projects they never chose, and which their own scriptures, read honestly, do not sanction.

The Universal Principle

And this same pattern, can be found wherever religion is abused in the service of political ambition.

Not where faith engages the world — because faith must engage the world; that is its whole purpose.

But where faith is hollowed out by those who claim it, kept as an empty vessel to be filled with whatever ambition the moment requires, and then held up as though it were the Divine mandate itself.

There are those who, claiming the name of Christ — whose message was one of love for the neighbour and care for the stranger — have used his name to justify the most terrible violence.

In the year 2011 of the Gregorian calendar, a Norwegian man named Anders Breivik, claiming to defend what he called Christian Europe from an imagined Muslim threat, murdered seventy-seven people, most of them teenagers at a summer camp.

He framed his act as Christian defence.

The Christian churches of Europe, almost without exception, condemned him in the strongest possible terms.

Pope Benedict condemned him.

The Lutheran Church of Norway condemned him.

Because Breivik was not practising Christianity.

He was practising political extremism with Christian costume.

And we could walk this same path through every tradition.

Buddhist nationalism in Myanmar committing atrocities against the Rohingya.

Hindu nationalism in India committing violence against Muslim and Christian minorities.

And yes — because honesty costs us nothing — Muslim political movements that have done terrible things in our own tradition’s name: Daesh, so-called Islamic State, which has murdered more Muslims than non-Muslims; al-Qaeda, whose violence has been overwhelmingly against fellow Muslims; the Taliban and the many smaller sectarian militias that have killed Shi’a and Sunni alike in Pakistan and Iraq and Afghanistan.

A political project seeks mass mobilisation.

It reaches for the nearest religious vocabulary.

It selectively amplifies.

It caricatures its opponents.

It promises eternal reward for temporal violence.

And ordinary believers — believers who in another generation, in another context, would have lived their faith quietly and well — are drawn into acts and attitudes that their own scriptures, read with care, prohibit.

What This Means for Our Reading of History

I say all of this now, in the closing session of a four-week journey through two Shi’a scholars who died a thousand years ago, because I want us to be absolutely clear about how we read the historical record.

The earth belongs to God.

He is not a real-estate dealer who allots territory to one people at the expense of another.

He is not a respecter of nations.

He does not prefer Arab to Persian, or Jew to Palestinian, or Turk to Kurd, or European to African.

These are categories of human politics, not of divine plan.

The Qur’an tells us plainly:

يَا أَيُّهَا النَّاسُ إِنَّا خَلَقْنَاكُم مِّن ذَكَرٍ وَأُنثَىٰ وَجَعَلْنَاكُمْ شُعُوبًا وَقَبَائِلَ لِتَعَارَفُوا ۚ إِنَّ أَكْرَمَكُمْ عِندَ اللَّهِ أَتْقَاكُمْ

“O humanity! Indeed, We created you from a single male and female, and made you into peoples and tribes so that you may come to know one another. Truly the most noble of you in the sight of God is the most God-conscious of you.”

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

Every human being, born into whatever tradition they were born into, has a single duty: to strive and to yearn and to work tirelessly towards the Truth, and in that striving, to live with honour, with compassion, and with justice.

That is the command.

The accidents of birth — the tradition you were raised in, the family you came from, the nation whose passport you carry — these are tests, not trophies.

They are the conditions within which you must work out your relationship with your Creator.

They are not credentials that elevate you above your neighbour.

And this is why, when we read the history of our tradition honestly, we do not tell a story of Shi’a versus Sunni, or Muslim versus Jew, or Muslim versus Christian.

We tell a story of truth versus the abuse of truth — a story that cuts through every tradition and that finds its honest servants, and its dishonest exploiters, in every community that has ever existed.

And this is the deep pattern that our two brothers would have recognised instantly — because the Commander of the Faithful, Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, peace and blessings be upon him, whose words Sayyed al-Radhi compiled into Nahj al-Balagha, spoke about this mechanism a thousand years before anyone in this hall was born.

He spoke about men who use religion as a cloak for their ambition.

He spoke about men who quote scripture to serve power rather than serving power to uphold scripture.

He spoke about the poisoning of religious discourse by the contamination of political greed.

In Sermon 50 of Nahj al-Balagha, he said:

إِنَّمَا بَدْءُ وُقُوعِ الْفِتَنِ أَهْوَاءٌ تُتَّبَعُ، وَأَحْكَامٌ تُبْتَدَعُ، يُخَالَفُ فِيهَا كِتَابُ اللَّهِ، وَيَتَوَلَّى عَلَيْهَا رِجَالٌ رِجَالاً عَلَى غَيْرِ دِينِ اللَّهِ

“The beginning of the occurrence of sedition is passions that are followed, and innovations that are introduced — in which the Book of God is contradicted, and over which men take authority over other men, on a basis other than the religion of God.”

— Nahj al-Balagha, Sermon 50

This is the mechanism.

It has always been the mechanism.

And it is the mechanism we see at work whenever we see a Shi’a or a Sunni or any political authority — medieval or modern — reaching for a theological weapon to serve a worldly ambition.

The Seljuqs, when they closed the Shi’a flourishing of Baghdad, were not doing theology.

They were consolidating power.

The Wahhabi Saudi state, when it destroyed Karbala and Baqi, was not doing theology.

It was consolidating power.

And the pattern repeats, in our own age, wherever you see it.

So when you listen to this series — and when you share it with your Sunni friends, your Sunni neighbours, your Sunni colleagues, as I hope you will — please understand what we are doing and what we are not doing.

We are not rehearsing grievances.

We are not dividing the Ummah.

We are not saying that to be Shi’a is to be against the Sunni, or that to be Sunni is to be against the Shi’a.

We are reading the history of our tradition honestly — which means naming, when they occurred, the moments when particular political projects, using particular narrow ideological frames, moved against our scholars and our scholarship.

And we are reading it this way because it is the only way to understand how our inheritance survived to reach us — and what kind of political and social conditions allow any religious tradition, Shi’a or Sunni, to flourish or to wither.

The flourishing of Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha in Baghdad was not a Shi’a flourishing only.

It was a flourishing of Islamic scholarship itself — in which the Shi’a held their distinctive place, but in which Sunni, Mu’tazilite, and even non-Muslim scholars also benefited, and which contributed to Islamic civilisation as a whole.

When the Seljuqs closed that window, they did not just damage Shi’a scholarship.

They damaged the entire intellectual culture of Islamic Baghdad.

The library that burned in 447 AH was not a Shi’a library only.

It was a library of Islamic learning, accumulated across schools, across generations, across sects.

Everyone lost when it burned.

This is the lens through which this series asks you to read it.

And with that understanding fixed in your heart — we can now, God willing, return to the graves of our two brothers, and close this four-week journey where it has always been meant to close.

The Eulogy — Standing Together at the Graves

Before we close, let us return — one final time — to Karbala.

Across the past three weeks, we have stood at these graves twice already.

Last week, beside Sayyed al-Murtadha.

The week before, beside the younger brother — Sayyed al-Radhi — and his father.

Tonight, we stand at all three together — and we raise our eyes, finally, beyond them.

Let us make the short journey, together, from this gathering to Karbala.

Let us walk through the streets of the Holy City, past the pilgrims and the traders and the mourners, past the great golden dome of the Grandfather whose martyrdom we mark with our tears every Muharram.

Let us enter the sacred precincts of the Ha’ir.

And let us stand, in the stillness within, at three graves laid side by side — two brothers, and beside them, their father.

This is where our four-week story has led us.

Not to a conclusion in a library in Baghdad.

Not to a final lecture in the Dar al-Ilm.

But to a quiet patch of soil in Karbala, where the two brothers whom God raised up for the Shi’a community in its hour of greatest need now lie in the eternal company of the Imam in whose service they spent every breath of their lives.

The Shared Salutation

Peace be upon you, O two sons of Abu Ahmad al-Husayn.

Peace be upon you, O two sons of Sayyedah Fatima, daughter of the grandson of the grandson of Imam Zayn al-Abedin, peace be upon him.

Peace be upon you, O two brothers of Baghdad — who were separated by thirty years of the elder’s lonely grief, and who now rest beside each other, where no separation can ever reach you again.

Peace be upon you, O two inheritors of the Dar al-Ilm, O two servants of Nahj al-Balagha, O two architects of the scholarly tradition we have inherited, O two lights of the Karkh quarter of Baghdad when the world was still young and the Buyid window was still open.

Peace be upon you — salutations upon you, peace upon you, mercy upon you, and the blessings of God upon you — in this life and in the life that is to come.

And Beyond Their Graves — to the One in Whose Service They Lived and Died

And now, let us raise our eyes from the graves.

Because these two brothers did not live and die for themselves.

They did not build the Hawza, preserve the hadith, dispatch their students across the Mediterranean, sell their estates, endure the fire of 422, carry thirty years of grief, for their own glory or their own name.

Everything they built was in service of One whom they knew they would never meet in this world.

Everything they built was to prepare a community worthy of his return.

O Master of the Age.

O Proof of God.

O Son of al-Hasan al-Askari.

O Son of Fatima.

Peace be upon you, O Argument of God in His lands.

Peace be upon you, O Sight of God among His creatures.

Peace be upon you, O Light of God in the darknesses of the earth.

Peace be upon you, O Awaited One, for whose coming the prophets wept and to whose banner every messenger before Muhammad — peace be upon him, his family and his righteous companions — pointed.

Sayyed al-Radhi was born in 359 of the Hijra.

Sayyed al-Murtadha died in 436.

Between those two dates — in the very generations in which these two brothers lived their lives — the Greater Occultation of our Twelfth Imam had begun.

The year 329.

Just thirty years before Sayyed al-Radhi’s birth.

The Ghaybat al-Kubra — the Major Occultation — was, for Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha, the freshest wound of the community into which they had been born.

And they understood, with a clarity that the centuries have sometimes dimmed for those who came after them, what the occultation meant.

It did not mean that the Imam, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, had abandoned his community.

The occultation was not his absence from us.

It was our unreadiness to receive him.

It did not mean that the community was excused from responsibility.

The occultation was not a permission to sleep.

It was a summons to prepare.

It did not mean that the believer should retreat into private devotion and wait passively for a reappearance that would sweep away all evil and require nothing of them.

The occultation was, and is, an active awaiting — a wait that demands of every believer that they become, in their own life, in their own family, in their own community, the kind of believer worthy of serving under the Imam’s banner when he returns.

This is why Sayyed al-Radhi compiled Nahj al-Balagha.

This is why Sayyed al-Murtadha sold his lands for paper.

This is why they built the Dar al-Ilm.

This is why they trained Shaykh al-Tusi.

This is why they dispatched Ibn al-Barraj to Tripoli and Sallar to Aleppo and Abu al-Salah to the whole of Bilad al-Sham.

Because every stone they laid, every manuscript they copied, every student they fed was a stone in the foundation of a community waiting for the Imam — a community that would, God willing, one day be ready.

And — let me say this plainly, because if there is one thing that this four-week session should leave in your hearts, it is this.

Every generation of sincere believers — from Sayyed al-Radhi’s generation to our own — carries a portion of the responsibility for preparing the ground for the Imam’s return.

Every act of honest scholarship brings the day closer.

Every act of genuine justice brings the day closer.

Every believing father who raises his children on the love of the Ahl al-Bayt brings the day closer.

Every believing mother who teaches her children to pray brings the day closer.

Every scholar who engages the world’s confusion with patience and rigour brings the day closer.

Every believer who refuses to be drawn into sectarian hatred, who meets their neighbour — Sunni or Christian or Jewish or atheist — with the dignity the Qur’an commands, brings the day closer.

Every one of us who works at being the kind of servant the Imam, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, would recognise as worthy, brings the day closer.

And every act of negligence, every surrender to despair, every retreat into passivity, every word of cruelty spoken in the name of our tradition, every moment in which we exchange the inheritance of the Ahl al-Bayt for the cheap currencies of this world — pushes the day further away.

O God, be — for Your Friend, the Proof, the son of al-Hasan, may Your blessings be upon him and upon his fathers — in this hour, and in every hour — a guardian, a protector, a leader, a helper, a guide, and a watchful eye — until You settle him upon Your earth in obedience, and grant him long enjoyment therein.

Our Covenant Tonight

So let us, in this final moment of this four-week gathering, renew with God what Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha renewed with Him every morning of their lives.

O God — we renew tonight, in this gathering, our covenant with Your Proof.

We renew our pledge.

We renew our allegiance.

We place it, this very hour, upon our necks — and we swear, by Your mercy, that we shall not turn away from it, and we shall not let it vanish.

O God — appoint us among his helpers.

Among his aides.

Among his protectors.

Among those who hasten to his command and race toward his cause.

And if death should come to us before his reappearance — the death that You have decreed inevitable for every one of Your servants — then raise us from our graves, wrapped in our shrouds, answering his call, to stand in the ranks of those who march beneath his banner.

O God — hasten his relief.

Make his hardship easy.

Let us see, with these eyes, the face of our Imam.

Let us drink from the cup of his justice.

Let us live in the age of his sun, the age in which the earth will be filled with equity and justice as thoroughly as it is today filled with oppression and tyranny.

Hasten, hasten, O our Master, O Master of the Age.

The Closing Supplication

O God — Lord of the Worlds, Lord of every age, Lord of the seen and the unseen, Lord of the awaited Imam in whose service these two brothers spent every breath of their lives.

We thank You, tonight, for the gift of this four-week journey.

We thank You for Sayyed al-Radhi — the younger, who gave us Nahj al-Balagha and died at forty-seven leaving no wealth behind because he had given it all away.

We thank You for Sayyed al-Murtadha — the elder, who gave us the foundations of every Hawza in the world and carried his brother’s absence for thirty years without ever letting it stop him.

We thank You for the household that raised them, for the parents who prepared them, for the teacher who took them on, and for the four students through whom their inheritance reached every corner of the Mediterranean and Persian worlds.

We thank You for the library that burned, and we thank You — even more — for the book that could not burn, because it had already escaped to too many hearts to be reached by any fire.

We thank You for the courage they carried into the intellectual arena of their age — for their refusal to retreat, for their willingness to read every book and engage every interlocutor and answer every argument with rigour and with grace.

And we thank You for the lesson their lives finally teach us: that the story of our tradition is not a story of one community against another, but a story of truth standing against the abuse of truth — in every age, in every tradition, on every continent of this earth that belongs to You alone.

O God — make us, in our own lives, like Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha were in theirs.

Make our households like the household of Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn — where the words of the Imams were spoken with such love that the children grew up unable to imagine a life that did not serve them.

Make our voices, when we engage the world, like the voices of the brothers — careful, prepared, gracious, willing to represent our opponent’s view in its strongest form before we answer it.

Let us argue bil lati hiya ahsan — in the way that is most beautiful — and never confuse cruelty for conviction or mockery for manhood.

Make our hands, when fire comes for what we have built, like the hand of Sayyed al-Murtadha — that did not close the school, did not announce a season of mourning, but moved to a new house in Karkh and returned, that very day, to its lessons.

Make our hearts, when grief sits beside us, like the heart of the elder brother who carried his loss for thirty years and never let it become a reason to stop.

Make us willing, like Sayyed al-Radhi, to do one thing well for Your sake — even if no one ever knows our name.

Make us willing, like Sayyed al-Murtadha, to give away what we have rather than hoard it — to open our libraries, to fund our students, to dispatch our knowledge outward into soil where fire cannot find it.

O God — we ask You, by the love You have for the descendants of Your Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family and his righteous companions — grant us tawfeeq.

Grant us success in the work You have entrusted to us.

Grant us the rigour, the patience, the courage, and the humility that Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha carried into every act of their lives.

Let us not waste the days You have given us.

Let us not arrive at our final hour with the work undone.

And O God — for our beloved Master, the Imam of this Age, the Proof of God upon His earth, the son of al-Hasan al-Askari, peace be upon him and upon his fathers — be, in this hour and in every hour, his guardian, his protector, his leader, his helper, his guide, and his watchful eye.

Hasten his relief.

Make his hardship easy.

And count us, by Your mercy, among those who labour, as the brothers laboured, to prepare the ground for the day of his return.

For the occultation continues, O Lord, because we are not yet ready.

Make us ready.

Let every act of our lives — every word taught to a child, every truth defended in love, every household built on Your remembrance, every neighbour met with the dignity Your Qur’an commands, every act of service offered to Your creation — be a stone we lay in the foundation of the community he will one day lead.

And O God — when our own time comes, as it came for Sayyed al-Radhi at forty-seven and for Sayyed al-Murtadha at eighty, grant us husn al-khatima.

A good ending.

The ending of those whom You have chosen and who have chosen You.

Let us depart this world in the manner of these two brothers — with our work given to those who would carry it forward, our libraries opened, our students fed, and our hearts at peace with the One who created us.

Let us depart, O Lord, having scattered enough of what we carried into enough hearts that no fire of any age can reach all of it at once.

Let our inheritance, like Nahj al-Balagha, escape every catastrophe by having already been given away.

And let us be reunited, by Your mercy, with our beloved Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha, beside their father, beside their Grandfather Imam Husayn — in a Paradise where the soil of Karbala lies open beneath our feet, where the company of the Ahl al-Bayt is ours forever, and where the face of the Imam, may our souls be his ransom, and may You, Our beloved Lord, hasten his return, is the first sight our eyes meet.

May the peace of God be upon our two brothers, Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha, resting beside their father, beside their Grandfather Imam Husayn, in the soil of Karbala tonight as we speak.

And may the peace of God be upon every scholar, every teacher, every mother, every father, every student, every believer who has ever lived their life in service of preparing the ground for the return of the Imam, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return — from the earliest companions of the Prophet to this gathering tonight.

And may God count us, in His mercy, among that company.

O Allah, send Your blessings upon Muhammad and the family of Muhammad — and hasten their relief — and curse their enemies, all of them.

Amen, O Lord, Sustainer of the Universes.

Amen, O Most Merciful of the Merciful.

A Closing Word

And so we close, after four weeks, the journey of two brothers.

We began three weeks ago with two boys at the gate of a mosque, and a mother who had walked them there.

We end tonight with three graves in Karbala, and our eyes raised toward One whose grave we have never visited and whose face we have never seen — and yet whose absence shapes every breath of every day we have together in this world.

The brothers built what they built so that we, in our own age, might be a little more ready.

May we be that.

May our households become a little more like Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn’s.

May our scholarship — whatever scholarship we have, however modest — become a little more like Sayyed al-Murtadha’s: open, generous, dispatched outward into the world.

May our public lives — whatever public station we occupy — become a little more like Sayyed al-Radhi’s: dignified, principled, willing to refuse a thousand dinars rather than betray a single word of truth.

And may the day of the Imam’s return — the day for which the brothers spent every hour of their lives preparing — find us standing where they would have wanted us to stand.

With our work given away.

With our hearts ready.

With our faces turned toward him, and our feet already moving in his direction.

Teaser for Next Week

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

Preamble

Tonight, we do not begin with a book.

We begin with thirty years.

Thirty years of a man who outlived his younger brother and never quite got over it.

Thirty years of the elder, who, when his younger died at forty-seven, could not even walk to the funeral — who fled instead to the shrine of Imam Musa al-Kadhim, peace and blessings be upon him, and let the vizier of the Abbasid caliph lead the prayer in his place.

Thirty years of the senior scholar of his age, the most influential single Shi’a teacher of the fifth century of the Hijra, the man whose books would form the intellectual foundation of every Hawza that has ever taught in any city in the Shi’a world.

And yet — even as he carried that grief — those thirty years became the most productive years of his life.

His scholarly output expanded.

His students multiplied.

His library grew to a size the Islamic world had not seen in private hands before.

His authority spread, in his own lifetime, from Baghdad westward to Aleppo and Tripoli and across the whole of the Mediterranean Levant.

Listen to one short saying, preserved by his younger brother in Nahj al-Balagha — a saying of Imam Ali, peace and blessings be upon him, on what kind of life is worthy of the name living:

لَا تَكُنْ مِمَّنْ يَرْجُو الْآخِرَةَ بِغَيْرِ عَمَلٍ، وَيُؤَخِّرُ التَّوْبَةَ بِطُولِ الْأَمَلِ

“Do not be of those who hope for the Hereafter without action, and who postpone repentance through the length of their hopes.”

— Nahj al-Balaghah, compiled by al-Sharif al-Radhi, Maxim (al-Hikam), Saying 150

Twenty-two words.

The mark of a wasted life: hoping for what comes next while doing nothing in this one.

The man we sit with tonight refused that mark.

He had every excuse for it.

He had grief.

He had age.

He had wealth and station and the kind of public exhaustion that, in lesser men, would have been a perfectly understandable reason to slow down.

He did not slow down.

He gave the next thirty years of his life — every day of them, until his death at the age of eighty years and eight months — to the work his younger brother could no longer do.

Tonight, we walk the full life of Sayyed al-Murtadha.

Alam al-Huda.

The Banner of Guidance.

Video of the Majlis (Sermon/Lecture)

Audio of the Majlis (Sermon/Lecture)

Recap

In Session 65, two weeks ago, we met the two brothers as boys.

We met their mother walking them to the mosque of al-Karkh.

We met the dream that brought them to Shaykh al-Mufid.

We met the household into which they were born and the names their father whispered into their ears at the call to prayer.

And we left them at the threshold of their lives — the soil prepared, ready for what was about to grow.

Last week, in Session 66, we walked the full life of the younger brother — Sayyed al-Radhi.

We sat with what he produced in just forty-seven years: three commentaries on the Holy Qur’an, treatises on the figurative sayings of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family and his righteous companions, a Diwan of poetry that the literary critics of his age placed among the finest of the century, the founding of the Dar al-Ilm in Baghdad eighty years before the Nizamiyyah was built — and the one book for which the world would remember him, Nahj al-Balagha, the Peak of Eloquence, completed in the year 400 of the Hijra, six years before his death.

We sat with the three public offices he held from the age of twenty-one until his death — the Naqib al-Talibiyin, the Amir al-Hajj, the head of the Diwan al-Mazalim — and with the dignity he carried into all three.

We watched him refuse a thousand gold dinars from the vizier al-Mahlabi, and refuse to sign the Caliph al-Qadir’s denunciation of the Fatimids, and respond to his dismissal from all three offices with a poem declaring that his dignity remained untouched.

And we walked him to his grave.

The sixth of Muharram, 406 of the Hijra.

Forty-seven years old.

Dying without wealth, having given everything away — to his students, to the poor of the Talibid family he supervised, to the Dar al-Ilm he had founded, to the free copying of manuscripts for young scholars.

We sat with the funeral.

We watched Sayyed al-Murtadha, his elder brother, unable to bring himself to attend — fleeing instead to the shrine of Imam Musa al-Kadhim, peace and blessings be upon him, and weeping there.

We watched Fakhr al-Mulk, the vizier of the Abbasid caliph — the chief minister of the very government that had privately despised everything Sayyed al-Radhi stood for — step in to lead the prayer in his place.

And we followed Sayyed al-Radhi’s body, after its initial burial in his Karkh home, through its final transfer to Karbala — to the Ha’ir of Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him, where he was laid to rest beside his father, the Naqib Sayyed Abu Ahmad al-Husayn al-Musawi.

Two graves, in Karbala, beside the Master of the Martyrs.

The compiler of the words of Imam Ali, resting beside the body of Imam Husayn.

That is where we left him.

Tonight, we turn to the brother who buried him, and to the thirty years that followed.

Sayyed al-Murtadha and the Twenty-Three Years

If Sayyed al-Radhi was the poet, Sayyed al-Murtadha was the architect.

If Sayyed al-Radhi gave us a book, Sayyed al-Murtadha gave us the structures — intellectual, institutional, spiritual — that would carry the Shi’a community forward through the next two centuries and beyond.

And where Sayyed al-Radhi’s life was cut short at forty-seven, Sayyed al-Murtadha was given a long life.

He lived to be eighty years and eight months old — passing away in the year 436 of the Hijra, thirty years after his younger brother, and twenty-three years after the death of their teacher Shaykh al-Mufid in 413 of the Hijra.

Those twenty-three years, between Shaykh al-Mufid’s death and his own, are the years in which Sayyed al-Murtadha became what history remembers him as:

And what he did with those years is the substance of tonight’s session.

The Master of the House

When Shaykh al-Mufid passed away in 413 AH, the question of who would lead the Shi’a community after him was, in one sense, already answered.

Shaykh al-Mufid himself had prepared his successor.

Sayyed al-Murtadha had studied under him for decades, had already authored major works of theology and jurisprudence, had long been recognised as Shaykh al-Mufid’s most brilliant student, and had been functioning as a senior scholar in his own right for years.

When Shaykh al-Mufid died, the students of the Karkh mosque did not need to look elsewhere.

They had their new teacher.

But the leadership Sayyed al-Murtadha inherited was not only a scholarly leadership.

It was also an administrative one — and it had already begun, as we saw last week, with Sayyed al-Radhi.

But before we speak of the offices he held, we need to pause on the books he wrote.

Because the books are the reason the man is still known.

And they are not remembered only by historians.

They are remembered by every advanced student, in the two great seminaries of our tradition, who has ever sought to reach the rank of ijtihad — the rank of an independent jurist capable of deriving the rulings of our faith from their sources.

Let me put it as plainly as I can.

In the Hawza of Najaf, and in the Hawza of Qom, as we sit in this majlis tonight — a thousand years after Sayyed al-Murtadha’s death — his books are still being opened, still being debated, still being dissected line by line.

They are not the textbooks of the first-year student.

A first-year student in Qom or Najaf carries other, later, introductory books in his bag.

But the day a student in Qom or Najaf reaches the highest level of study — what is called Bahth al-Kharij, the advanced lectures given by the senior scholars of our age — the day that student sits at the feet of a Marja al-Taqlid and seeks to derive a ruling from its roots, five books sit open on the table in front of him.

And all five of those books were written, in Baghdad, in the first third of the fifth century of the Hijra — by a scholar whose title we will soon hear, and hear properly, in the dream through which he received it.

Let me name them for you.

Because each one of them is a world.

The first is al-Dharia ila Usul al-Sharia — The Path to the Principles of the Sacred Law — one of the earliest comprehensive Shi’i works on the science of Usul al-Fiqh, the principles by which a jurist derives law from its sources.

Every discussion of how Shi’i jurisprudence reasons about revelation — how the scholar moves from a verse or a hadith to a ruling — begins, at its roots, with Sayyed al-Murtadha’s Dharia.

A thousand years on, the senior scholars of Qom and Najaf still trace the origins of their own jurisprudential principles back to this book.

The second is al-Intisar — The Victory — a work of comparative jurisprudence, written to document the rulings on which the Imami Shi’a school stood apart from the schools of our Sunni brethren.

When a scholar today teaches a lesson on what distinguishes the Shi’a legal position — on ablution, on prayer, on marriage, on inheritance — al-Intisar is the foundational reference to which he will return.

The third is Tanzih al-Anbiya — The Vindication of the Prophets — a rigorous theological defence of the doctrine of isma — the infallibility of the Prophets and the Imams.

Whenever a student is faced with a Qur’anic verse that seems, on its surface, to attribute a mistake to a Prophet — whether to Prophet Adam, or to Prophet Moses, or to others — Sayyed al-Murtadha’s Tanzih al-Anbiya is the book that teaches him how to read the verse properly, with the tools of Arabic grammar and theological precision.

The fourth is al-Shafi fi al-Imama — The Sufficient Treatise on the Imamate — a monumental defence of the succession of Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, written specifically in response to the great Mu’tazilite scholar Qadi ʿAbd al-Jabbar, who had challenged the Shi’a doctrine in his own encyclopaedic work al-Mughni.

Al-Shafi is considered, by the scholars of our tradition, to be one of the most rigorous defences of the doctrine of Imamah ever written.

So important was this book that Sayyed al-Murtadha’s own student Shaykh al-Tusi later wrote a condensed version of it called Talkhis al-Shafi — and that summary, too, is still studied in the Hawza today.

And the fifth is Amali al-Murtadha, also known as Ghurar al-Fawa’id wa Durar al-Qala’id — The Dictations of al-Murtadha, or The Choice Benefits and Pearl Necklaces — a vast literary and exegetical work that stands, in the library of his brother’s Nahj al-Balagha, as its theological counterpart.

Where Nahj al-Balagha preserves the eloquence of the Commander of the Faithful, Sayyed al-Murtadha’s Amali preserves the depth of classical Arabic, the nuance of Qur’anic exegesis, and the literary horizon in which the Imams spoke.

It is a masterclass in the Arabic of the revelation.

Five books.

Each one of them, on its own, would have secured a scholar’s reputation for a century.

Together, they have been the intellectual foundation of Shi’i jurisprudence for a thousand years.

Every serious Mujtahid, every Marjaʿ, every Ayatullah — in Najaf, in Qom, and in every Hawza that descends from these two — has built his training on them.

This is what Sayyed al-Murtadha produced.

And he produced it alongside — not instead of — the public responsibilities he carried.

Remember from last week: Sayyed al-Radhi had held three official positions during his lifetime.

The Naqib al-Talibiyin — the leadership of the descendants of Abu Talib, the office their father had held before them.

The Amir al-Hajj — the supervision of the pilgrimage caravan to Makkah.

And the head of the Diwan al-Mazalim — the chief of the High Court of Grievances, which, in the judicial structure of Abbasid Baghdad, was the highest appellate court of the caliphate.

The court of last resort for those who had been wronged by the powerful.

When Sayyed al-Radhi died in 406, these three positions passed to Sayyed al-Murtadha.

And Sayyed al-Murtadha held them — with a gap of only the briefest transition — for the remaining thirty years of his life.

The biographical sources record that he served as head of the Diwan al-Mazalim for thirty years.

Thirty years as the chief justice of the highest court in Baghdad.

Thirty years ruling on the complaints of those who had been wronged.

Thirty years handing down verdicts in a city where the political winds could shift overnight and a verdict against the wrong man could cost a scholar his position, his wealth, even his life.

And through all of this, he was also teaching.

Writing.

Leading the Shi’a community.

Training the generation of scholars who would carry the tradition into the fifth century of the Hijra — a generation that would include, most notably, a young man who arrived in Baghdad from the Persian city of Tus: Shaykh al-Tusi, whom we will meet in a future session, God willing.

The man Sayyed al-Murtadha trained for twenty-three years.

The man who would carry everything he learned from Sayyed al-Murtadha out of Baghdad when the city turned on the Shi’a — and plant it, afresh, in the soil of Najaf.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

The Dream That Gave Him His Name

Of all the titles that Sayyed al-Murtadha carried in his lifetime — Sharif al-Murtadha, Sayyed al-Murtadha, Dhu al-Majdayn (the Possessor of Two Glories, given to him by the Buyid prince Baha’ al-Dawla) — the title by which he is most remembered, and the one under which his books are still catalogued in every Shi’i library in the world, came to him through a dream.

A dream that was not his own.

The classical biographical sources preserve the incident with remarkable consistency.

The earliest to record it, as far as we can trace, was Shahid al-Awwal — the First Martyr — whose given name was Muhammad ibn Makki al-Ameli, a great jurist of the eighth century of the Hijra from the Jabal Amel region of what is today southern Lebanon.

He earned his title — the First Martyr — because he was executed by the Mamluk authorities in Damascus in the year 786 of the Hijra, for the crime of being a Shi’i scholar who would not renounce his faith.

We will meet him properly, God willing, in a future session of this sub-series — and may God rest his pure soul.

He recorded the story of Sayyed al-Murtadha’s title in a work of his called Kitab al-Arba’in — The Book of Forty — which, in the tradition of our scholars, was a genre: a collection of forty hadith, chosen with care, each one accompanied by the scholar’s own reflections, intended to transmit to future generations the narrations a scholar most wanted to safeguard.

From Shahid al-Awwal’s Kitab al-Arba’in, the story travelled.

It was picked up by Ibn Khallikan — the thirteenth-century Sunni historian and judge from what is today Iraqi Kurdistan, who served as chief judge of Damascus under the Mamluks.

We have already met him last week, in the funeral of Sayyed al-Radhi, where he preserved the detail of Sayyed al-Murtadha’s grief.

He compiled one of the most celebrated biographical dictionaries in the Arabic language, Wafayat al-A’yan — The Obituaries of the Notables — a vast collection of the lives of the prominent figures of Islamic civilisation, drawn from both Sunni and Shi’i sources.

He included the entry on Sayyed al-Murtadha, and he included the story of the dream.

That a Sunni judge in Mamluk Damascus would carry this narration forward, without polemic, is itself a testimony to the power of the account.

It was carried forward again by Ibn Abi al-Hadid — whom we met in Session 65, the Mu’tazilite scholar whose twenty-volume commentary on Nahj al-Balagha preserved so much of our own tradition for us — who recorded it in the biographical material at the opening of his Sharh — Commentary.

And centuries later, it was gathered into the great encyclopaedic project of Allamah al-Majlisi — the great scholar — whose massive compilation Bihar al-Anwar — The Oceans of Lights — running to one hundred and ten volumes, sought to preserve, in one place, every narration, every account, every biographical detail that the Shi’a tradition had produced in a thousand years.

The dream of the vizier, and the title given to Sayyed al-Murtadha, found its permanent home on his shelves.

Four sources, across four centuries, telling the same story.

Let me tell you what they say.

It was the year 420 of the Hijra.

Sayyed al-Murtadha was sixty-five years old.

He had already been leading the Shi’a community for seven years since Shaykh al-Mufid’s death, and his reputation had reached every corner of the Abbasid capital.

The vizier of the Abbasid Caliph al-Qadir — a man by the name of Muhammad ibn al-Husayn — fell gravely ill.

His illness continued.

No treatment seemed to help.

And one night, in the depth of his illness, the minister saw a dream.

In the dream, he saw the Commander of the Faithful, Imam Ali.

And the Imam said to him:

The minister, in the dream, was confused.

He asked:

And the Imam answered, plainly:

The biographical sources preserve the Arabic of this exchange as follows:

فَرَأَى فِي مَنَامِهِ أَمِيرَ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ عَلِيَّ بْنَ أَبِي طَالِبٍ (ع)، يَقُولُ لَهُ: «قُلْ لِعَلَمِ الْهُدَى يَقْرَأُ عَلَيْكَ حَتَّى تَبْرَأَ». فَقَالَ: يَا أَمِيرَ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ، وَمَنْ عَلَمُ الْهُدَى؟ فَقَالَ: «عَلِيُّ بْنُ الْحُسَيْنِ الْمُوسَوِيُّ».

“And he saw in his dream the Commander of the Faithful, Ali ibn Abi Talib (peace be upon him), who said to him: ‘Tell Alam al-Huda to recite over you, that you may be healed.’ He said: ‘O Commander of the Faithful, and who is Alam al-Huda?’ He answered: ‘Ali ibn al-Husayn al-Musawi.’”

— Shahid al-Awwal (Muhammad ibn Makki al-’Ameli, d. 786 AH), Kitab al-Arba’in, recorded also in Ibn Khallikan, Wafayat al-A’yan wa Anba’ Abna’ al-Zaman, entry on al-Sharif al-Murtadha; Ibn Abi al-Hadid, Sharh Nahj al-Balagha, Volume 1; and al-Majlisi, Bihar al-Anwar

And the minister awoke.

He wrote a letter.

He addressed it to Sayyed al-Murtadha.

He recorded what he had seen in his dream.

And he wrote, at the head of the letter, the name by which the Imam had instructed him to address his healer:

Alam al-Huda.

And when Sayyed al-Murtadha received the letter, and read the title by which the minister had addressed him — he refused it.

He wrote back.

He said, in effect:

The minister, in reply, explained what had happened.

Sayyed al-Murtadha made the recitation.

The minister was healed.

And when news of the incident reached the Caliph al-Qadir, the Caliph summoned Sayyed al-Murtadha — a Caliph, we should remember, whose government Sayyed al-Murtadha did not consider legitimate — and said to him:

And the Caliph ordered the government scribes, from that day forward, to record the name Alam al-Huda in every document that referred to him.

From that day, Sayyed al-Murtadha became known, across the Islamic world, by the title his ancestor had given him in a dream.

Alam al-Huda.

The Banner of Guidance.

Lessons Woven In

Pause with me here, because there is something worth sitting with in this story.

Sayyed al-Murtadha, when he received the letter, refused the title.

Think about that.

A man in his sixties.

A scholar at the peak of his powers.

The undisputed head of the Shi’a community.

A man who could have taken a glorious title and worn it openly, and no one would have objected.

And his first instinct, upon receiving it — was to say he did not deserve it.

This is the posture of a man who understood something about titles that our age, desperate as it is for recognition, has largely forgotten.

Titles are not achievements.

They are responsibilities.

A title does not tell you what you have done — it tells you what you are now obliged to become.

And the bigger the title, the heavier the obligation.

Alam al-Huda — the Banner of Guidance — is not a casual laqab or title.

It is a declaration that the one who bears it stands, in his age, as a sign by which the faithful orient themselves.

That is a burden, a duty, a responsibility.

And Sayyed al-Murtadha felt the burden before he felt the honour.

And even when he accepted it — because his Imam had commanded it through a dream, and the Caliph had confirmed it, and the scribes were already writing it — he accepted it as a man accepts an assignment, not as a man accepts a prize.

He spent the next sixteen years of his life, until his death in 436, carrying that title in the way titles are meant to be carried: by making himself, day after day, a little more worthy of it.

There is a lesson here for our age — for our communities, for our scholars, for those who carry titles of their own.

Shaykh.

Allamah.

Hujjat al-Islam.

Ayatullah.

These are not trophies.

They are not ranks to be competed for.

They are assignments — given by a tradition, confirmed by a community, and carrying an obligation to live up to them that does not lighten for a single day the bearer walks this earth.

The one who takes such a title lightly, or wears it arrogantly, has misunderstood what he has been given.

Sayyed al-Murtadha wept when he received his.

And that weeping is the beginning of the wisdom by which such titles are supposed to be carried.

The Library, the Mosque, and the Eighty Thousand Volumes

I want to pause now on one detail about Sayyed al-Murtadha that I think, more than any of his books or his titles or his positions, tells us what kind of scholar he was.

His personal library, at the time of his death, was estimated at eighty thousand volumes.

Let me pause on that number, because in the fifth century of the Hijra, it is genuinely staggering.

Eighty thousand handwritten manuscripts.

In an age before printing.

In an age when a single copy of a single book was the labour of weeks or months by a professional scribe.

In an age when entire scholarly communities might share a few hundred volumes between them.

One man, in Baghdad, had assembled eighty thousand.

The figure is preserved in the great biographical collections of our tradition — most prominently in Qadi Nurullah al-Shushtari’s Majalis al-Mu’minin — The Assemblies of the Believers — a sixteenth-century biographical work on the great scholars of the Shi’a, and in Sayyed Ali Khan al-Madani’s al-Darajat al-Rafi’a fi Tabaqat al-Shi’a — The Elevated Degrees in the Classes of the Shi’a — a seventeenth-century biographical compendium.

وَكَانَ لَهُ فِي دَارِهِ خِزَانَةٌ عَظِيمَةٌ مِنَ الْكُتُبِ بَلَغَتْ ثَمَانِينَ أَلْفَ مُجَلَّدٍ مِنْ مُصَنَّفَاتِهِ وَمُصَنَّفَاتِ غَيْرِهِ

“And he had in his house a great library of books, which reached eighty thousand volumes — both of his own compositions and of the compositions of others.”

— Preserved in Qadi Nurullah al-Shushtari, Majalis al-Mu’minin, Volume 1, Page 501; and in Sayyed Ali Khan al-Madani, al-Darajat al-Rafi’a fi Tabaqat al-Shi’a, Page 463

And what did he do with that library?

He did not hoard it.

He did not wall it off behind a private door, as lesser men with private treasures have always done.

The biographical sources tell us — with some tenderness — that he opened his library to every serious student who walked through his gate.

Shi’i or Sunni or Mu’tazili, jurist or theologian or grammarian — if the student had come to learn, the manuscripts were opened to him.

And Sayyed al-Murtadha went further than opening.

He funded the students themselves.

He sold parts of his inherited estates — land, property, assets that had come down to him from his noble father — to provide paper, ink, and copying materials so that his students could reproduce the manuscripts they were studying and carry the copies away with them.

The account is preserved in al-Khwansari’s Rawdat al-Jannat — The Gardens of Paradise — the great nineteenth-century biographical encyclopedia of Shi’i scholars:

وَكَانَ السَّيِّدُ الْمُرْتَضَى رَحِمَهُ اللَّهُ قَدْ بَاعَ بَعْضَ ضِيَاعِهِ لِيُنْفِقَ ثَمَنَهُ عَلَى الطَّلَبَةِ وَفِي شِرَاءِ الْوَرَقِ وَالْأَدَوَاتِ لَهُمْ لِيَكْتُبُوا بِهَا

“And Sayyed al-Murtadha, may God have mercy upon him, sold some of his estates in order to spend the proceeds upon his students, and in purchasing paper and copying materials for them, so that they could write with them.”

— Al-Khwansari, Rawdat al-Jannat fi Ahwal al-‘Ulama’ wa al-Sadat, Volume 4, Page 296

And he paid his students regular monthly stipends, so that poverty would never be a barrier to their pursuit of knowledge.

The biographical sources preserve even the specific sums — which is remarkable, because in the ordinary course of things, the monthly stipends paid by one scholar to his students are not the kind of detail that survives a thousand years of transmission.

That these figures survived tells us how extraordinary they were considered in their own time.

The account reaches us through Sayyed Ali Khan al-Madani’s al-Darajat al-Rafi’a fi Tabaqat al-Shi’a — The Elevated Degrees in the Classes of the Shi’a — the seventeenth-century biographical compendium we named a moment ago:

وَكَانَ يُجْرِي عَلَى تَلَامِذَتِهِ الْأَرْزَاقَ، فَأَجْرَى عَلَى الشَّيْخِ الطُّوسِيِّ فِي كُلِّ شَهْرٍ اثْنَيْ عَشَرَ دِينَارًا، وَعَلَى الْقَاضِي ابْنِ الْبَرَّاجِ ثَمَانِيَةَ دَنَانِيرَ، وَعَلَى غَيْرِهِمَا بِحَسَبِ حَالِهِمْ

“And he would disburse regular stipends upon his students: he allotted to Shaykh al-Tusi, every month, twelve dinars; and to Qadi Ibn al-Barraj, eight dinars; and to the others according to their circumstances.”

— Sayyed Ali Khan al-Madani, al-Darajat al-Rafi’a fi Tabaqat al-Shi’a, Page 460

To put those sums in perspective for a modern audience: a gold dinar in fifth-century Baghdad was a substantial coin.

Twelve dinars a month was not pocket change — it was a genuine salary, enough for a young scholar to live, house himself, and concentrate on his studies without distraction.

Sayyed al-Murtadha was not offering tokens.

He was underwriting the formation of the next generation of Shi’i scholarship out of his own pocket.

And when, in the year 422 of the Hijra, the Hanbali faction in Baghdad rioted against the Shi’a community — one of several periodic eruptions of sectarian violence that the Buyid protection could never fully prevent — they burned his father’s house, the house Sayyed al-Murtadha had inherited, along with much of what it contained.

He lost property.

He lost manuscripts.

He lost decades of gathered possessions.

The account is preserved by Ibn Inaba in his ’Umdat al-Talib fi Ansab Al Abi Talib — The Principal Treatise on the Lineages of the Family of Abi Talib — a fourteenth-century genealogical work by a Sunni descendant of the Hasanid Sayyeds, which remains one of the most cited references across both Sunni and Shi’i traditions for the lineages and biographies of the Prophet’s family.

وَفِي سَنَةِ اثْنَتَيْنِ وَعِشْرِينَ وَأَرْبَعِمِائَةٍ احْتَرَقَتْ دَارُ أَبِيهِ فِي فِتْنَةِ الْحَنَابِلَةِ، فَانْتَقَلَ إِلَى دَارٍ أُخْرَى فِي الْكَرْخِ، وَعَادَ إِلَى دُرُوسِهِ

“And in the year 422, his father’s house was burned in the Hanbali rioting. So he moved to another house in Karkh, and he returned to his lessons.”

— Ibn Inaba, ’Umdat al-Talib fi Ansab Al Abi Talib, Pages 209–210

Read that final phrase again, because the biographical sources, for all their density of detail, preserve it in four Arabic words:

He did not close the school.

He did not stop teaching.

He did not announce a period of mourning for his losses.

He picked himself up, moved his surviving books and his students to a new location in the same neighbourhood, and continued.

He was sixty-seven years old at the time.

He would live and teach for another fourteen years after the fire.

This was the measure of the man.

And the scholars he trained — sitting in his classes, drawing his stipends, copying manuscripts from his library — carried what they had learned into every corner of the Shi’a world.

Four of them deserve, at minimum, to be named.

Qadi Ibn al-Barraj — the Judge of Tripoli

The first is the man whose stipend we have already heard — the eight gold dinars that Sayyed al-Murtadha paid him every month.

His full name was Sa’d al-Din Abu al-Qasim Abd al-Aziz ibn al-Barraj, born around the year 400 of the Hijra, and died in 481.

The biographical sources almost never call him by his full name.

They call him simply al-Qadi Ibn al-Barraj — Ibn al-Barraj the Judge — because of the office he would come to hold, and hold for decades.

Ibn al-Barraj made the journey that so many scholars of his age made.

From his home region, he travelled to Baghdad, to sit in the classroom of Sayyed al-Murtadha.

He became one of Sayyed al-Murtadha’s most brilliant students — so brilliant that Sayyed al-Murtadha underwrote his studies with the stipend we have named, so that he could focus on his learning without the distraction of worldly worry.

When Sayyed al-Murtadha died in 436, Ibn al-Barraj continued his studies under Shaykh al-Tusi — whom we will meet properly in a future session, God willing — completing his mastery of jurisprudence under the next generation of the chain.

And then Sayyid al-Murtadha’s plan for him unfolded.

Sayyed al-Murtadha sent him westward — across the Iraqi desert, into the mountains of Syria, to the coastal city of Tripoli, in what is today northern Lebanon.

To understand why this was such a significant posting, you have to understand what Tripoli was at that moment.

In the eleventh century of the Gregorian calendar, Tripoli was not the provincial city that later history would reduce it to.

It was a thriving, independent intellectual hub, ruled by the Banu Ammar — the Ammarid dynasty — who were themselves Twelver Shi’a.

They had established their own great Dar al-Ilm — House of Knowledge — in Tripoli, modelled on the one Sayyed al-Radhi had founded in Baghdad a generation earlier, and reputed to hold hundreds of thousands of manuscripts.

Tripoli, under the Banu Ammar, was one of the great Shi’i scholarly centres of the Mediterranean world.

And into that world, Ibn al-Barraj was sent — not merely as a teacher, but as the Chief Judge, the Qadi, of Tripoli.

He held that office for between twenty and thirty years.

He was the highest legal authority in a major Mediterranean state.

He did not simply teach Shi’a jurisprudence in a classroom — he applied it, day by day, in the governance of a Shi’a-ruled city.

Marriage, inheritance, commerce, criminal law, the organisation of public life: all of it passed across his desk.

And he wrote.

Two of his works are still considered classics in the Hawza today:

Al-Muhadhdhab — The Refined — his magnum opus.

A comprehensive encyclopedia of Shi’a jurisprudence that would deeply influence Allamah al-Hilli and the generations of scholars who came after him.

And Jawahir al-Fiqh — The Jewels of Jurisprudence — a systematic treatment of specific rulings and complex legal questions.

Through Ibn al-Barraj, the scholarly inheritance of Sayyed al-Murtadha’s classroom in Baghdad reached across the Fertile Crescent and took root on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Sallar al-Daylami — the Jurist of Aleppo

The second is a man whose Persian title tells you exactly where he came from.

His actual name was Abu Ya’la Hamza ibn Abd al-Aziz.

But the biographical sources almost never use it.

They call him Sallar al-Daylami — Sallar from the Persian salar, meaning commander or chief, al-Daylami marking him out as a son of the mountains we have heard so much about already in this sub-series:

Daylam, the highland region south of the Caspian Sea in northern Iran.

The same mountains from which the Buyid dynasty had emerged three generations earlier.

Like Ibn al-Barraj, Sallar made the scholarly migration from his homeland to Baghdad.

And like Ibn al-Barraj, he studied under the full chain — first under Shaykh al-Mufid, then under Sayyed al-Murtadha after Shaykh al-Mufid’s passing, and he maintained a lifelong intellectual relationship with his peer Shaykh al-Tusi.

Sayyed al-Murtadha trusted Sallar’s jurisprudential capabilities so deeply that he would sometimes permit Sallar to teach his own classes in Baghdad on his behalf — to stand in the master’s place before the master’s students.

And then Sayyed al-Murtadha sent him, as he had sent Ibn al-Barraj, westward. Sallar was appointed as a judge in the region of Aleppo — Halab, in northern Syria.

And here, too, we must pause, because Aleppo was not an accidental Shi’a setting.

It was the fruit of a scholarly and political inheritance that reached back a full century.

For most of the tenth century of the Gregorian calendar, northern Syria had been ruled by the Hamdanid dynasty — an Arab Shi’a Muslim house descended from the Banu Taghlib tribe of upper Mesopotamia, whose most celebrated prince, Sayf al-Dawla — the Sword of the Dynasty — ruled Aleppo from 945 to 967 of the Gregorian calendar — approximately 333 to 357 of the Hijri era.

And Sayf al-Dawla’s court at Aleppo was one of the great cultural capitals of the Islamic classical age.

The greatest Arabic poet of the century — al-Mutanabbi — lived at his court for nine years and wrote his finest verse there.

The great philosopher al-Farabi, whom we have already named in this sub-series as “the Second Teacher,” died in Aleppo under Sayf al-Dawla’s patronage.

The grammarian Ibn Jinni, the historian al-Isfahani, the preacher Ibn Nubata — the brightest intellectual lights of tenth-century Arab civilisation gathered at the Hamdanid court.

Aleppo, under Sayf al-Dawla, was to the tenth century what Baghdad under the Buyids would shortly become to the eleventh: the undisputed intellectual capital of its region, under Shi’a political patronage.

The Hamdanids were broken, eventually, by Byzantine military pressure from the north and by Fatimid pressure from the south, and their dynasty effectively ended in 1004 of the Gregorian calendar — approximately 394 of the Hijri calendar.

For two decades after their fall, Aleppo was contested territory.

And then, in 1024 (around 414 AH) — the year we have fixed on in this sub-series as the moment of Shi’a flourishing at its peak — another Shi’a Arab tribal dynasty, the Mirdasids, took the city.

The Mirdasids were a family of the Banu Kilab tribe, a Bedouin Arab tribe of northern Syria, and their founder Salih ibn Mirdas captured Aleppo from its Fatimid governor in that same year.

They would rule Aleppo — as a Shi’a tribal emirate, carefully balancing the pressures of Fatimid Cairo, Byzantine Constantinople, and Buyid Baghdad — for most of the next fifty-six years, until their dynasty was, under later Seljuq pressure, compelled to convert to Sunnism and eventually absorbed into the rising Seljuq order.

It was into this living Shi’a Aleppo — successor to the Hamdanid century, now governed by the Mirdasids, still a great intellectual centre of the Levant — that Sayyed al-Murtadha sent Sallar al-Daylami as a judge.

And there Sallar produced the work for which the Hawza still honours him a thousand years later: al-Marasim al-Alawiyya fi al-Ahkam al-Nabawiyya — The Alawid Decrees Regarding the Prophetic Rulings — almost always referred to, in Hawza parlance, simply as al-Marasim.

Al-Marasim is not merely a book of legal rulings.

It is a book of legal architecture.

Sallar was one of the very first Shi’a scholars to systematically organise the entire body of Islamic jurisprudence into a logical structure — separating acts of worship, ibadat, from everyday transactions and contracts, mu’amalat.

This classification, which Sallar helped pioneer, remains the organising principle by which every Hawza in the world structures its jurisprudential curriculum today.

When a senior scholar says, in a Hawza lecture,

— they are speaking, across a thousand years, to Sallar al-Daylami.

Abu al-Salah al-Halabi — the Deputy of Sayyed al-Murtadha

The third student is a man whose very title tells you what Sayyed al-Murtadha thought of him.

His name was Taqi al-Din Abu al-Salah Taqi ibn Najm al-Halabi, born around 374 of the Hijra, died in 447.

His epithet al-Halabi tells us his origin: he was a native of Aleppo — the same city we have just walked through, where his contemporary Sallar al-Daylami would later serve as a judge under Sayyed al-Murtadha’s appointment.

But Abu al-Salah was not a visitor to that city.

Abu al-Salah was of it.

When he was born, around the year 984 of the Gregorian calendar — around 373 AH, Aleppo was still living in the memory of the Hamdanid century — Sayf al-Dawla had been dead only seventeen years, and his court’s glories were the stories told in the homes of Aleppo when Abu al-Salah was a boy.

And by the time Abu al-Salah reached his forties, the Mirdasids had taken the city and opened the Shi’a flourishing we have just described.

He lived through both.

The Hamdanid memory formed his childhood.

The Mirdasid flourishing enabled his career.

That is the man Baghdad was about to meet.

Abu al-Salah made the journey from Aleppo to Iraq in search of the highest scholarship of his age.

And he had the rare distinction, which few scholars of any generation ever match, of studying under all three of the great teachers of the Shi’a chain of his lifetime.

He attended the lectures of Shaykh al-Mufid toward the end of Shaykh al-Mufid’s life.

He became a devoted student of Sayyed al-Murtadha.

And he later studied under Shaykh al-Tusi.

Three teachers, any one of whom would have been the making of a scholar.

Abu al-Salah sat at the feet of all three.

And Sayyed al-Murtadha, recognising what this man was, did something for him that he did not do for any other student.

He sent Abu al-Salah back to Aleppo — back to his home city, back to the Mirdasid Shi’a emirate that had just opened — but not merely as a judge, and not merely as a teacher.

He sent him as his own official representative — his khalifa, his deputy — for the Shi’a communities of the entire region of Aleppo and Bilad al-Sham, greater Syria.

Think about what this meant, politically.

Sayyed al-Murtadha in Baghdad, the most senior Shi’a scholar in the Islamic world, was appointing his own personal deputy to the Shi’a emirate of Aleppo — across a frontier, across a political boundary, across the realm of one Shi’a power and into another.

And the Mirdasid emirs received him.

The scholarship of Baghdad and the scholarship of Aleppo were being stitched together by one man.

And Sayyed al-Murtadha gave this appointment operational weight.

The scope of the network Sayyed al-Murtadha was running from Baghdad was genuinely extraordinary.

His surviving correspondence — preserved in a body of writings that later biographers call his Masa’il, his Answers to Questions — shows us that inquiries reached him from Shi’a communities across the Levant and upper Mesopotamia.

Questions came from Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, from Sidon and Tripoli on the Lebanese coast, from Mosul in the Jazira, and of course from Aleppo.

Sayyed al-Murtadha was not merely the head of a Baghdad seminary.

He was the central scholarly authority for the Shi’a of half the Islamic world.

And when letters came from Aleppo and the Levantine regions around it, Sayyed al-Murtadha made a practice — deliberately, consistently, and publicly — of redirecting the questioners back to Abu al-Salah.

The biographical sources record his position clearly.

Shahid al-Awwal — whom we have met tonight, the First Martyr who preserved the dream of Alam al-Huda — referred to Abu al-Salah in his own writings as Sayyed al-Murtadha’s deputy in scholarship.

And Shahid al-Thani — the Second Martyr, Zayn al-Din al-Ameli of the tenth century of the Hijra, whom we will meet in a future session of this sub-series — expanded upon this and explicitly described Abu al-Salah as Sayyed al-Murtadha’s deputy — khalifa — in Aleppo itself.

As Shahid al-Thani records:

كَانَ أَبُو الصَّلَاحِ الْحَلَبِيُّ خَلِيفَةَ السَّيِّدِ الْمُرْتَضَى عَلَمِ الْهُدَى فِي بِلَادِ حَلَبَ، وَكَانَ السَّيِّدُ يُرَدُّ إِلَيْهِ مَسَائِلَ أَهْلِ الشَّامِ

“Abu al-Salah al-Halabi was the deputy of Sayyid al-Murtadha, ʿAlam al-Hudā, in the region of Aleppo — and al-Sayyid would refer to him the questions of the people of greater Syria.”

— Shahid al-Thani (Zayn al-Din al-Ameli, d. 966 AH), preserved in his Ijazat as gathered by Allamah al-Majlisi in Bihar al-Anwar, Kitab al-Ijazat (Vol. 105 in the standard Beirut Mu'assasat al-Wafa' 110-volume edition); independently cited by Allamah Bahr al-Ulum in al-Fawa'id al-Rijaliyya; cited in standard references including al-Khwansari, Rawdat al-Jannat, Volume 2, and discussed in the entry on Abu al-Salah al-Halabi in Encyclopaedia Iranica (Hassan Ansari)

So when the believer in Aleppo, or in Sidon, or in Tripoli, or in Tiberias, had a legal or theological question — Sayyed al-Murtadha, in far-off Baghdad, would write back with the same answer he gave again and again:

The appointment was so significant that Abu al-Salah came to be known, in the biographical literature, as Khalifat al-Murtadha — the Deputy of al-Murtadha.

And after Sayyed al-Murtadha’s death, Shaykh al-Tusi confirmed him in the same role, so that Abu al-Salah came to be known also as Khalifat al-Shaykh — the Deputy of the Shaykh.

Two of the greatest scholars of the tradition, across two generations, delegated their own authority to one man in one city.

Abu al-Salah’s masterpiece is the book we mentioned earlier in tonight’s session without naming him — al-Kafi fi al-Fiqh — The Sufficient in Jurisprudence.

And note the title: al-Kafi.

The same word Shaykh al-Kulayni had chosen for his hadith collection a century earlier.

The same humility.

The Sufficient.

Not the complete, not the comprehensive — the sufficient, for the believer who needed to live his faith in the streets and markets of a Shi’a Aleppo under the Mirdasids.

And characteristically for a student of Sayyed al-Murtadha’s school, Abu al-Salah did not open al-Kafi fi al-Fiqh with legal rulings.

He opened it with theology — with ilm al-kalam, the foundational doctrines of the faith — because, as he understood from his teacher:

Shaykh al-Tusi — the greatest of all

And finally — and only briefly, because the greatest of them all deserves his own session and will receive it in the coming weeks, God willing — we must name the young scholar who arrived in Baghdad in the year 408 of the Hijra, from the Persian city of Tus in Khorasan, near what is today the holy city of Mashhad.

His name was Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Tusi.

He was twenty-three years old when he arrived in Baghdad.

He joined the circle of Shaykh al-Mufid, and studied at his feet for five years, until Shaykh al-Mufid’s death in 413.

And then — and for the next twenty-three years, until Sayyed al-Murtadha’s own death in 436 — he became the closest disciple of Sayyed al-Murtadha.

Twenty-three years at the feet of one teacher.

Long enough to inherit everything.

And when Sayyed al-Murtadha died, the leadership of the Shi’a community — the teaching, the Dar al-Ilm, the network of students, the fragile relationship with the Abbasid court, the entire inheritance of Baghdad’s Shi’a renaissance, the bonds with Ibn al-Barraj in Tripoli and Sallar in Aleppo and Abu al-Salah across greater Syria — fell upon Shaykh al-Tusi’s shoulders.

The Abbasid Caliph al-Qa’im himself recognised what had happened, and appointed Shaykh al-Tusi to the Chair of Theology in Baghdad — a formal caliphal recognition that the young man from Tus had become the successor to the lineage.

What Shaykh al-Tusi would do with that inheritance — how he would complete the Four Books by writing the third and fourth with his own hand, how he would face the Seljuq conquest of Baghdad, how he would watch his own library burn, and how he would, in the burning rubble of that catastrophe, plant the seed of what would become the Hawza of Najaf, the scholarly institution that still stands today — all of that, God willing, is in the coming weeks.

For tonight, it is enough to say: Sayyed al-Murtadha, on his deathbed in 436, knew exactly whom he was leaving his life’s work to.

Four students.

Four regions.

Three dynasties.

One teacher.

Ibn al-Barraj as judge in Tripoli, under the Twelver Shi’a Ammarids.

Sallar al-Daylami as judge in Aleppo, under the Shi’a Mirdasids, in the living shadow of the Hamdanid century.

Abu al-Salah al-Halabi as Khalifat al-Murtadha across the whole of Mirdasid-era Aleppo and greater Syria.

And Shaykh al-Tusi in Baghdad — in what was still, for another eleven years, a Buyid-protected Shi’a flourishing — and then, after the Seljuq conquest, in the desert town of Najaf.

One teacher had taught them all.

The Thirty Years Alone

And so Sayyed al-Murtadha carried on.

He was fifty-one when his brother died.

He would live for another thirty years — dying in the year 436 of the Hijra, at the age of eighty years and eight months.

Thirty years is a long time to carry grief.

Thirty years is a long time to be the elder who outlived the younger.

And yet the biographical sources record that Sayyed al-Murtadha did not shrink from the task that now fell to him.

If anything, his scholarly output expanded after his brother’s death.

He took over all three of Sayyed al-Radhi’s offices — the Niqaba, the Amir al-Hajj, the Diwan al-Mazalim — and held them, as Judge al-Tanukhi recorded, for the next thirty years.

He continued to teach at the Dar al-Ilm.

He continued to write.

He dispatched his four great students, as we have heard, across the Levant.

And the library that he had been building for decades grew to its staggering eighty thousand volumes.

In a sense, Sayyed al-Murtadha carried his brother’s absence the way a man might carry a wound that never quite healed — working around it, teaching through it, living in the knowledge that the younger brother who should have outlived him did not.

And then came his own time.

The Second Departure — Sayyed al-Murtada

It was the twenty-fifth day of Rabi’ al-Awwal, in the year 436 of the Hijra.

The Gregorian date was 1044 of the Common Era.

Sayyed al-Murtadha was eighty years and eight months old.

The biographical sources tell us that al-Najashi — his student, the great biographer of the Shi’a scholarly tradition, whose Rijal would become one of the foundational reference works of Shi’i scholarship — was present at his master’s deathbed and afterwards washed his body for burial.

Sallar al-Daylami — the Persian student we have met tonight, who had sometimes taught in Sayyed al-Murtadha’s place — was also present and assisted.

What did Sayyed al-Murtadha see, in his final hours, as he looked back across eighty years?

He had seen the Buyid golden window open in his childhood, flourish through his middle years, and begin to fray at its eastern edges as the Ghaznavids pressed in.

He had seen three Abbasid caliphs.

He had studied under Shaykh al-Mufid.

He had buried his mother, his father, and — thirty years before his own death, and perhaps most painfully of all — his younger brother.

He had watched his house burn in the Hanbali riots of 422 and built a new one.

He had written the books that would, for the next thousand years, form the intellectual foundation of Shi’i Islam.

He had trained the scholars who would carry that inheritance across the Mediterranean world.

He had been given a title from his great ancestor in a dream.

And now he was ready to meet that ancestor face to face.

He died peacefully, the sources tell us, surrounded by his students.

He too was buried, initially, in his own residence in the Karkh quarter of Baghdad — the same house, the same Karkh, where he had lived and taught for his entire adult life.

And then, following the same custom his father and his brother had followed before him, his body was transferred to Karbala.

He was laid to rest beside his father Sayyed Abu Ahmad, and beside his brother Sayyed al-Radhi — the three of them together, under the shadow of the shrine of Imam Husayn, in the Ha’ir — inner sanctuary — that had drawn generations of Alid scholars to its holy soil.

The two brothers, who had been born four years apart in Baghdad, and had been separated by thirty years of Sayyed al-Murtada’s lonely labour — were, at the last, reunited.

Not in Baghdad where they had lived and worked and taught.

But in Karbala, beside the Grandfather whose love had shaped every line of every book either of them had ever written.

The Eulogy — To Sayyed al-Murtadha

Before we close, let us stand, in our hearts, at the grave.

Let us make the short journey, together, from this gathering to Karbala.

Let us walk through the streets of the Holy City, past the pilgrims and the traders and the mourners, past the great golden dome of the Grandfather whose martyrdom we mark with our tears every Muharram.

Let us enter the sacred precincts of the Ha’ir.

And let us stand, in the stillness within, at the third grave laid beside the two we visited last week — an elder brother who carried thirty years of grief and never let it stop him, now reunited with the younger brother he could not bring himself to bury, and with the father whose office he inherited and held with honour for thirty years.

Let us greet him.

Peace be upon you, O Sayyed Abu al-Qasim, Ali ibn al-Husayn al-Musawi.

Peace be upon you, O Alam al-Huda — the Banner of Guidance, whose title the Commander of the Faithful himself chose for you, in a dream given to another man at his point of deepest need.

Peace be upon you — you who studied under Shaykh al-Mufid for twenty-three years and carried his inheritance for another twenty-three after him.

Peace be upon you — you who wrote the books that became the foundations of the Hawza, and whose words are still opened in every seminary of the Shi’a world a thousand years later.

Peace be upon you — you who sold your lands to buy paper for the students who had no means, who paid stipends to the young scholars who would become the architects of our tradition, who built a library of eighty thousand volumes and opened it to every serious seeker who walked through your gate.

Peace be upon you — you whose house was burned in the riots of 422, and who moved to another house in Karkh and resumed your lessons the very next day.

Whose four Arabic words — wa ada ila durusihi — and returned to his lessons — teach us how a scholar responds to catastrophe.

Peace be upon you — you who could not bear to walk to your brother’s grave, and who carried his absence for thirty years while continuing to build, to teach, to give.

Peace be upon you — you who dispatched your students across the Mediterranean and the Persian world, and whose teaching still echoes from Tripoli to Aleppo to Najaf to Qom to every city where a student of the Ahl al-Bayt opens a book tonight.

Peace be upon you, O Sharif al-Murtadha — the Beloved of God, the one whose very name was written in the verses of the Qur’an before you were given it.

O God — we ask You, by his love of the Ahl al-Bayt, by his thirty years of patient labour after his brother’s departure, by the scholars he trained and the library he built and the students he fed — elevate his station among the saints.

Place him beside his brother, beside his father, beside his Grandfather, in the highest Paradise.

And let every word of every book he left behind — al-Shafi, al-Dhakhira, Tanzih al-Anbiya, al-Dhari’a, the Amali — be a light that rises to his soul.

The Closing Supplication

O God — Lord of Sayyed al-Murtadha, who lived eighty years and eight months and gave every one of those years to a work greater than himself.

We thank You, tonight, for the gift of his long life and for the patience with which he carried it.

We thank You for the five books that became the foundations of our scholarly tradition, for the eighty thousand manuscripts he gathered and shared, for the stipends he paid to students who could not afford their own studies, for the four students he dispatched across the Mediterranean to plant the seed of his teaching in soil that fire could not reach.

And we thank You — most of all — for the thirty years.

The thirty years he carried alone.

The thirty years he bore his brother’s absence without ever making it a reason to stop.

The thirty years in which he became, through patient labour and quiet grief, the architect of every Hawza that has ever taught in any city in the Shi’a world.

O God — make us, in our own work, like Sayyed al-Murtadha was in his.

When titles are placed upon us — Shaykh, Allamah, Hujjat al-Islam, scholar, teacher, parent, leader — let us receive them as he received Alam al-Huda.

Let us weep at the burden before we accept the honour.

Let us spend the rest of our days, however many You grant us, becoming a little more worthy of what we have been called.

When fire comes for what we have built — and fire comes for every life, in some form, sooner or later — let us respond as he responded.

Not by closing the school.

Not by announcing a season of mourning.

But by moving to a new house in Karkh and returning, that very day, to our lessons.

Wa ada ila durusihi. And he returned to his lessons.

Let those four Arabic words be the rule of our lives in every season of loss.

When grief sits beside us, as it sat beside him for thirty years, let us not let it stop us.

Let us carry it the way he carried his — working around it, teaching through it, giving more of ourselves precisely because the one who would have shared the burden is no longer at our side.

O God — we ask You, by Your love for the Ahl al-Bayt, peace be upon them all, grant us tawfeeq.

Grant us success in the work You have entrusted to us.

Grant us the stamina Sayyed al-Murtadha carried into every one of his eighty years.

Grant us the generosity that opened his library to every serious seeker, regardless of what tradition that seeker came from.

Grant us the wisdom to dispatch what we have learned outward — into our families, into our communities, into the wider world — rather than hoarding it for ourselves.

And O God — for our beloved Master, the Imam of this Age, the Proof of God upon His earth, the son of al-Hasan al-Askari, peace be upon him and upon his fathers — be, in this hour and in every hour, his guardian, his protector, his leader, his helper, his guide, and his watchful eye.

Hasten his relief.

Make his hardship easy.

And count us, by Your mercy, among those who labour, as Sayyed al-Murtadha laboured for thirty years after his brother’s death, to prepare the ground for the day of his return.

For the occultation continues, O Lord, because we are not yet ready.

Make us ready.

Let every act of patient teaching, every act of quiet generosity, every act of carrying on through grief and through fire and through the closing of windows we thought would never close — be a stone we lay in the foundation of the community he will one day lead.

And O God — when our own time comes, as it came for Sayyed al-Murtadha at eighty years and eight months, surrounded by the students he had trained, washed by the disciples he had taught — grant us husn al-khatima.

A good ending.

The ending of those whom You have chosen and who have chosen You.

Let us depart this world having transferred everything we carried to the hands of those who will carry it after us.

Let us depart with our work given away, our libraries opened, our students fed, our hearts at peace with the One who created us.

And let us be reunited, by Your mercy, with our beloved Sayyed al-Murtadha, beside his brother and his father and his Grandfather, in a Paradise where the soil of Karbala lies open beneath our feet and the face of the Imam, may our souls be his ransom, and may You, O our Lord, hasten his return, is the first sight our eyes meet.

O God, send Your blessings upon Muhammad and the family of Muhammad — and hasten their relief — and curse their enemies, all of them.

Amen, O Lord, Sustainer of the Universes.

Amen, O Most Merciful of the Merciful.

Teaser for Next Week

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

Preamble

Tonight, we do not begin with ten words.

We begin with one life.

A life of forty-seven years.

Not a long life, by any measure.

Not by the measure of the Hawza tradition, where forty-seven is the age at which most great scholars are only just reaching the fullness of their prowess.

Not by the measure of his own elder brother, who would outlive him by thirty years and bury him beside their father in Karbala.

Not by the measure of his teacher, who would follow him to the grave nine years later.

Forty-seven years.

And in those forty-seven years — three commentaries on the Holy Qur’an, a treatise on the distinctive features of the Imams, a work on the figurative sayings of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family and his righteous companions, a Diwan of his own poetry that the literary critics of his age placed among the finest of the century, a foundational role in a House of Knowledge that would become the prototype for every great Islamic seminary that came after, three of the most lucrative and politically dangerous offices in the Abbasid administration — and one book.

One book.

A book whose first words, before any sermon or letter or saying, were the words of his ancestor — the Commander of the Faithful, Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, peace and blessings be upon him.

A book that he completed six years before his death, in the full knowledge, perhaps, that nothing else he ever wrote would outlive it.

Nahj al-Balagha. The Peak of Eloquence.

Listen to one of the maxims he chose to preserve in that book — a saying of Imam Ali on the kind of life that is worth measuring:

قِيمَةُ كُلِّ امْرِئٍ مَا يُحْسِنُهُ

“The worth of every person is what they do well.”

— Nahj al-Balaghah, compiled by al-Sharif al-Radhi, Maxims (al-Hikam), Saying 81

Ten words.

The worth of every person is what they do well.

Not how long they live.

Not how much they accumulate.

Not what titles they wear or what offices they hold.

What they do well.

Tonight, we sit with a man who, in forty-seven years, did one thing well — better than anyone in the Arabic-speaking world had ever done it before him, or has ever done it since.

He gave us back the voice of his ancestor, and our Imam.

And in giving us that voice, he gave us — and the world, Sunni and Shi’a alike, and the academies of every continent — a book that has not stopped being read for one thousand years.

Tonight, we walk the full life of Sayyed al-Radhi.

Video of the Majlis (Sermon/Lecture)

Audio of the Majlis (Sermon/Lecture)

Recap

Last week, in the first session of this four-part journey, we met two boys.

We met their mother — Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn — the noblewoman of the al-Nasir line, granddaughter of the Alid warrior-scholar al-Hasan al-Atrush, who knew exactly what her two sons carried in their veins and exactly what she wanted them to become.

We met their father — Sayyed Abu Ahmad Husayn ibn Musa al-Musawi — the Naqib al-Talibiyin of Baghdad, the official representative of the Prophet’s descendants at the Abbasid court, a man so trusted by both the caliph and the Buyid princes that he held that office seven separate times across his long life.

We met the household into which the two brothers were born — a house of wealth and political standing in the dangerous Karkh quarter of fourth-century Baghdad, where Shi’i scholars walked past the ashes of burned libraries on their way to the mosque, and where an Alid family was expected — by everyone — to produce leaders, scholars, judges, men who could hold the line.

We met the names their father chose for them: al-Murtadha, the Chosen One, from the verse of Surah al-Jinn that speaks of the messengers God has approved; and al-Radhi, the Content One, from the verse of Surah al-Fajr that addresses the soul at peace returning to its Lord, well-pleased and well-pleasing.

We met the dream — Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, peace and blessings be upon her, holding the hands of her two young sons al-Hasan and al-Husayn, peace be upon them, and saying to Shaykh al-Mufid:

And we met the morning that followed, when Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn walked her two children to the mosque of al-Karkh, and Shaykh al-Mufid wept, and took them on as his students.

We sat with the lessons of that household and that morning — the lesson that the family is the first institution of learning, that no school and no Hawza can ever replace what a mother and a father plant in a child, and that the work of every believing parent in every age is the same work Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn did when she walked her sons to the gate of the mosque.

And we left the two brothers there — at the threshold of their lives, the soil prepared, ready for what was about to grow.

Tonight we watch what grew in the younger brother.

The Contribution — The Pen and the Sword of the Intellect

In every age, there are scholars who preserve, and there are scholars who produce.

There are those who carry the tradition faithfully to the next generation — and there are those who give the tradition something it did not have before.

In the early sessions of this sub-series, we met three of the preservers.

Shaykh al-Kulayni.

Shaykh al-Saduq.

And, by extension through the Four Books, Shaykh al-Tusi — whom we will meet properly in a future session, God willing.

Tonight, we meet the first of two producers.

A scholar who, in his short life, took the scattered eloquence of the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him — sermons delivered in the heat of political crisis, letters written on horseback between battles, short sayings caught by a companion on the road — and gathered it all together, for the first time, into a single book.

This is not a small contribution.

What this one brother did, in forty-seven years — redrew the intellectual map of Shi’ism for every century that would come after.

Let us meet him.

Sayyed al-Radhi and the Book That Was Always Going to Be Written

Sayyed al-Radhi died young.

He was forty-seven years old when he passed away in the year 406 of the Hijra — which is to say, nine years before his teacher Shaykh al-Mufid would follow him to the grave, and thirty years before his elder brother would finally be laid beside him.

Of the three giants of their generation — Shaykh al-Mufid, Sayyed al-Murtadha, and Sayyed al-Radhi — the youngest was the first to go.

And yet.

In those forty-seven years, he produced a body of work that any scholar of any century would have been proud to leave behind.

Three separate commentaries on the Holy Qur’an.

The first — Talkhis al-Bayan ʿan Majazat al-Qur’an, which translates as The Distillation of the Statement on the Figurative Language of the Qur’an — addressed those verses where the literal sense alone could not unlock the meaning, and where the Arabic of the Book of God was working at a level deeper than its surface.

The second — Haqa’iq al-Ta’wil fi Mutashabih al-Tanzil, The Realities of Interpretation in the Ambiguous Verses of the Revelation — addressed those verses whose meanings the early scholars had disputed.

Only the fifth chapter of this great work has come down to us, but those who read it in his lifetime considered it without parallel in its time.

And a third, a more general work of exegesis, simply titled Tafsir al-Qur’an.

A treatise on the distinctive features of the Imams — Khasa’is al-A’immah.

A work on the figurative sayings of the Prophet — Majazat al-Athar al-Nabawiyya — the literary counterpart to his Qur’anic studies, applying the same method of analysis to the prophetic tradition.

An extensive Diwan of his own poetry, which his contemporaries considered the finest of the age, and which in some later assessments has been ranked alongside the greatest Arabic poets of the Islamic tradition.

A jurisprudential work — Ta’liq ʿala Khilaf al-Fuqaha’ — Notes on the Disagreements of the Jurists — through which he engaged the legal debates of his age.

And — perhaps as enduring as any of his books — a founding role in a house of learning in Baghdad.

He established the Dar al-Ilm, the House of Knowledge.

A school that he funded from his own resources.

Equipped with manuscripts.

Opened to scholars of every persuasion — Shi’i, Sunni, Mu’tazilite, Ash’arite, jurist, poet, theologian, philologist.

And taught in himself while still a young man.

And listen to this, because it is one of the quiet ironies of Islamic intellectual history: the Dar al-ʿIlm of Sayyed al-Radhi was founded fully eighty years before the famed Nizamiyyah of Baghdad — the celebrated school of the Seljuq vizier Nizam al-Mulk al-Tusi, the school that is usually remembered, in the standard histories, as the great prototype of the Islamic madrasah.

The biographical sources have suggested that when Nizam al-Mulk came to design his own great institution, he modeled it upon what Sayyed al-Radhi had built in Baghdad before him.

The institution that the standard histories credit as the founding model of the madrasah — was, in fact, modeled on a Shi’i institution that came eighty years earlier.

Any one of these achievements would have been enough for a scholarly reputation.

And he produced all of them before he was fifty.

But it is none of these for which we remember him tonight.

We remember him for one book.

One book that he completed in the year 400 of the Hijra — six years before his death.

One book that he did not so much write as gather — patiently, source by source, manuscript by manuscript, across years of scholarly reading.

One book whose purpose, as he tells us in his own preface to it, was simple:

“كان أمير المؤمنين (عليه السلام) مَشْرَعَ الفَصَاحَةِ وَمُورِدَهَا، وَمَنْشَأَ البَلاغَةِ وَمَوْلِدَهَا، ومِنْهُ ظَهَرَ مَكْنُونُهَا، وَعَنْهُ أُخِذَتْ قَوَانِينُهَا.”

“Amir al-Muminin (peace be upon him) was the fountainhead of eloquence and its source, the birthplace of rhetoric and its origin. From him appeared its hidden secrets, and from him its rules were extracted.”

— Sayyed al-Radhi, Nahj al-Balagha, Preface

To paraphrase:

And yet these words were scattered — across histories, across chronicles, across the papers of narrators, across the margins of books.

No one had ever pulled them together into a single volume.

No one had ever let the reader see, in one place, the full range of the eloquence of the Commander of the Faithful.

So Sayyed al-Radhi did it.

He called it Nahj al-Balagha.

The Path of Eloquence.

Or — as it has more often been rendered into English — The Peak of Eloquence.

And into it he put what he judged to be the most eloquent of the sermons of Imam Ali, the most powerful of his letters, and the most striking of his shorter sayings.

He organised the book into three parts: the sermons first, the letters second, the sayings third.

He did not add to the words.

He did not modify them.

He did not paraphrase them.

He selected them, he arranged them, he titled them — and he presented them to the world.

And the world has not stopped reading them since.

Lessons Woven In

Pause with me here, because there is something in the way Sayyed al-Radhi approached this work that is worth learning from.

He did not write his own book.

He could have.

He had the literary gift for it — the biographical sources are unanimous on this.

He composed poetry that the greatest literary minds of his age, including many who were not Shi’i, praised without reservation.

He could have built his reputation on his own voice, and that alone would have carried his name for centuries.

But he chose, instead, to submerge his own voice entirely — so that the voice of his ancestor, of his Imam, could be heard.

He did not put his name over the sermons.

He did not insert his opinions between them.

He did not paraphrase Imam Ali into easier language.

He trusted that the words themselves, laid out plainly and beautifully, would do their own work.

This is the mark of a scholar who understands what he is serving and what he is not.

Sayyed al-Radhi did not compile Nahj al-Balagha to make himself famous.

Nahj al-Balagha made him famous because he was willing to disappear into it.

There is a lesson in this for everyone who teaches, writes, speaks, or carries the tradition in any form.

The moment we start making ourselves the centre of the story — our interpretations, our cleverness, our personal brand — we have misunderstood our job.

The job is to be the conduit.

The job is to carry the words of those who are infinitely greater than us, as clearly and as faithfully as we can, and to let them do the work on the listener’s heart.

And remember — Sayyed al-Radhi understood this not as a young student still finding his voice.

He understood it as a mature scholar at the height of his powers.

A man who had already written three commentaries on the Qur’an, a treatise on the features of the Imams, a book on the figurative sayings of the Prophet, a jurisprudential work of his own, and a Diwan of poetry that his own contemporaries had placed among the greatest of the age.

A man who had already founded a school in Baghdad before he was thirty years old.

A man who, if he had wanted to, could have spent the last decade of his life adding a dozen more books to his own name.

Instead, he chose to spend those years gathering the words of another.

And he completed the gathering six years before his death — in the full knowledge, perhaps, that the book he had just finished would outlive everything else he had ever written.

Outlive him by over a thousand years and counting.

That is the mark of a scholar who has stopped trying to build a reputation.

He was too busy serving a tradition.

And God, in His way with such servants, gave him a reputation that no amount of self-promotion could ever have purchased.

God help us, in our own lives and in our own work, to understand what Sayyed al-Radhi understood.

The Significance of Nahj al-Balagha

So what is actually in this book that, a thousand years later, is still being taught at Oxford and Leiden and al-Azhar?

It contains, among many other things, three texts that changed the intellectual trajectory of Islamic civilisation.

The first is Letter 53 — the letter of Imam Ali to Malik al-Ashtar, whom the Imam had appointed as his governor over Egypt.

This letter is not a short letter.

In most printings it runs to ten or fifteen pages.

And in it, Imam Ali lays out — point by point, class by class, principle by principle — the entire theory and practice of just governance.

How a ruler should treat his subjects.

How a ruler should manage his army.

How a ruler should organise the collection of taxes.

How a ruler should conduct himself with the poor and the weak.

How a ruler should appoint judges, select advisors, reward merit, and punish wrongdoing.

How a ruler should communicate directly with the people, and why no ruler is safe who cuts himself off behind a wall of ministers and guards.

Listen to one short passage from it, so you can hear the register in which the Commander of the Faithful was writing:

وَأَشْعِرْ قَلْبَكَ الرَّحْمَةَ لِلرَّعِيَّةِ، وَالْمَحَبَّةَ لَهُمْ، وَاللُّطْفَ بِهِمْ، وَلَا تَكُونَنَّ عَلَيْهِمْ سَبُعًا ضَارِيًا تَغْتَنِمُ أَكْلَهُمْ، فَإِنَّهُمْ صِنْفَانِ: إِمَّا أَخٌ لَكَ فِي الدِّينِ، وَإِمَّا نَظِيرٌ لَكَ فِي الْخَلْقِ.

“Infuse your heart with mercy for your subjects, and love for them, and kindness toward them. And do not be over them a ravenous beast, counting their devouring as gain — for they are of two kinds: either a brother to you in religion, or your equal in creation.”

— Imam Ali, Letter 53 to Malik al-Ashtar, compiled by Sharif al-Radhi in Nahj al-Balagha

That single sentence, fourteen centuries ago, settled a question that Western political philosophy did not settle until the twentieth century, and in some of its institutions has not settled yet.

Every human being under your governance — believer or not, of your tribe or not, of your language or not — is either your brother in faith, or your equal in humanity.

There is no third category.

There is no category of human being whom the ruler may treat as less than human.

This letter has been studied in departments of political theory from Tehran to Toronto.

The United Nations Development Programme, in a report on Arab governance published in the early 2000s, recommended Letter 53 to world leaders as a foundational text on just administration.

And it came to us only because a scholar in Baghdad, at the height of his prowess, chose to spend his years gathering what others had allowed to scatter.

One man.

One decision.

And a book that the community — the Ummah — and indeed the world, has not stopped reading for a thousand years.

And we pray, with every heart in this gathering tonight, that the reading of it would not remain only reading.

That the words of the Commander of the Faithful — on justice, on mercy, on governance, on the treatment of the weak, on the accountability of the powerful, on the discipline of the soul — would not remain only words on a page, admired from a distance.

That they would be lived.

That they would be applied.

That the rulers of this world would govern by them.

That the communities of this world would be shaped by them.

That the hearts of this world would be softened by them.

Because if they were — and only if they were — then the world our children are to inherit would be a world worth inheriting.

The second text is the Sermon of al-Shiqshiqiyya — Sermon 3 in the arrangement of Nahj al-Balagha.

In this sermon, Imam Ali speaks, with a candour that startles the reader even today, about the events after the passing of the Prophet.

About the caliphate.

About who took it, and how, and with what consequences for the community.

About his own patience across twenty-five years.

About the moment, finally, when the community turned to him — and what he found when he assumed the caliphate he had never sought.

This sermon is the theological and political heart of the Shi’a position on the events of early Islam, preserved in the voice of the Commander of the Faithful himself.

Without this sermon in our hands, a great deal of what we understand about the early tragedy of this ummah would be lost.

The third is the body of the maxims — the short sayings, gathered in the third part of the book.

Last week’s session opened with one of them:

النَّاسُ أَعْدَاءُ مَا جَهِلُوا

“People are the enemies of what they do not know.”

— Nahj al-Balaghah, compiled by al-Sharif al-Radhi, Maxims/Sayings (al-Hikam), Saying 172

There are four hundred and eighty of these maxims in the collection.

Each one, on its own, is a small universe.

Together, they are the distilled practical wisdom of the Commander of the Faithful on every matter of human life — from governance to friendship to wealth to death to the discipline of the soul.

Three texts.

One book.

One young man who did not live to see his fiftieth birthday.

And this is why, when we walk into a library in Qom, or Najaf, or Tehran, or Beirut, or Cairo, or London, or Jakarta — and we see Nahj al-Balagha sitting on the shelf in whatever language that library speaks — we should feel, quietly, the presence of a young scholar in Baghdad, a thousand years ago, who chose to spend his short life as a conduit for a greater voice.

The Scholar Who Was Also a Public Man

And there is one more thing to say about Sayyed al-Radhi before we walk him to his grave, because it matters for everything we have just heard about Nahj al-Balagha.

He did not live the life of a retreating scholar.

He did not spend his days in the solitude of a private library, beyond the reach of the city.

Sayyed al-Radhi lived at the centre of public life in Baghdad — and to understand the weight of what that meant, we need only remind ourselves, briefly, of the political world we have been walking through in this sub-series.

You will recall from our sessions on Shaykh al-Kulayni and Shaykh al-Mufid the story of the Buyid golden window — the sons of the Daylamite mountain fishermen, the memory of the Alid refugees, the conquest of Baghdad in 334 AH, the installation of a compliant Abbasid caliph who reigned in name while the Buyid amir ruled in substance.

We have watched that window open under Mu’izz al-Dawla and come to its peak under ʿAdud al-Dawla.

Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha were born into its flourishing — and lived their entire adult lives within it.

But there is a detail about this arrangement that we must name here, because it bears directly on what we are about to discuss.

The Buyid amir was the real power in Baghdad — but he was not the only power.

The Abbasid caliph still sat on the throne.

The caliph’s name was still on the coinage.

His name was still invoked in the Friday sermon.

Foreign embassies were still received in his court.

And most importantly for our story tonight — the institutional machinery of the caliphate still operated under the caliph: the judiciary, the chancery, the offices of state.

If you wanted to hold a public office in Baghdad, you held it as a servant of the caliph — even if the caliph himself held nothing but a crown the Buyid had let him keep.

And here is where the arrangement sharpened into danger.

The Abbasid caliphs during this window — Ta’i’ al-Billah, and after him al-Qadir — were, by institutional memory and personal conviction, the heads of the Sunni world, and their theological commitments did not soften simply because a Daylamite prince held the real sword.

They despised the Shi’a.

They despised the Fatimids in Egypt even more.

And they resented the Buyids for placing them in a position where they had to tolerate both.

So when Sayyed al-Radhi stepped, at the age of twenty-one, into the offices of the Abbasid caliphal administration — he stepped into a political arrangement that was, by any measure, a minefield.

He served under caliphs who privately despised everything he stood for, while being protected by Buyid princes who privately revered it.

He signed documents issued in the name of one power while drawing his security from another.

He made that arrangement work for the next twenty-six years.

And he held, from the age of twenty-one until his death at forty-seven, three of the most significant public offices available to a member of the Alid family in Abbasid Baghdad.

The first was the Naqib al-Talibiyin — the guardianship of the descendants of Abu Talib.

This was the office his father Sayyed Abu Ahmad had held.

It was the office we described at the opening of last week’s session.

The official overseer of every registered descendant of the Prophet’s family living in Baghdad and its surrounding regions — their welfare, their disputes, their standing at the caliph’s court.

The second was the Amir al-Hajj — the supervisor of the Hajj pilgrimage.

In the fourth century of the Hijra, the caravan that travelled from Iraq to Makkah was one of the largest annual pilgrimages in the Islamic world, gathering Muslims from across the Abbasid domain, the Fatimid domain, and the Shi’a territories of Persia and the Levant.

The man appointed to lead it had to be a figure whom the entire Muslim world — Sunni and Shi’a alike — could accept.

The Caliph al-Qadir, whom Sayyed al-Radhi despised and who despised him, still entrusted him with this office — because there was no one else in Baghdad of sufficient scholarly and moral standing to hold it.

And the third was the head of the Diwan al-Mazalim — the presiding judge of the High Court of Grievances.

In the judicial structure of the Abbasid state, this was the highest appellate court of the caliphate.

The court of last resort for those who had been wronged by the powerful.

A position which required both jurisprudential mastery and the kind of moral courage that could deliver a verdict against a minister, a general, or a prince.

Sayyed al-Radhi held these three offices, with only brief interruptions, from the age of twenty-one until his death at forty-seven.

And he held them on his own terms.

When the vizier Abu Muhammad al-Mahlabi sent him a thousand gold dinars as a gift on the birth of his son, Sayyed al-Radhi refused the gift — returning it with a note that the minister already knew he would not accept it.

When the Caliph al-Qadir summoned him to explain a poem in which he had praised the Fatimid caliph of Egypt, Sayyed al-Radhi refused to attend the meeting, and refused to sign the statement cursing the Fatimids that the Caliph had prepared.

The Caliph dismissed him from all three of his offices in retaliation.

Sayyed al-Radhi responded with a poem of his own, declaring that the dismissal had cost him nothing, and that his dignity was untouched.

This was a scholar who compiled Nahj al-Balagha.

And this was a man who lived Nahj al-Balagha.

In the same body.

In the same forty-seven years.

The Departure

And now, we must walk him to his grave.

Because every biography, no matter how glorious, has its final chapter.

And the final chapter of this biography is the most instructive of all — because it is in how a scholar departs this world, and what he leaves behind, that we see what his life was truly for.

The First Departure — Sayyed al-Radhi

It was the year 406 of the Hijra.

The month was Muharram.

Baghdad was in the grip of winter.

Sayyed al-Radhi — compiler of Nahj al-Balagha, poet of the Alid house, Naqib al-Talibiyin, Amir al-Hajj, founder of the Dar al-Ilm, the scholar who had lived Nahj al-Balagha as well as gathered it — was forty-seven years old.

Forty-seven.

The biographical sources record that he had been in ill health for some time.

We are not given a precise diagnosis.

What we are told is that he declined steadily through the early weeks of the year, and that he died on the sixth of Muharram, 406 AH — corresponding to the year 1015 of the Gregorian calendar.

Forty-seven years old.

Think about that age for a moment.

By the standards of the Hawza tradition, forty-seven is a scholar’s prime.

It is the age at which most great scholars are just reaching the fullness of their powers — the age at which Shaykh al-Tusi, God willing we will see in a future session, had only just begun his long partnership with Sayyed al-Murtadha.

The age at which Imam Khomeini, in our own tradition, was still a decade away from becoming a marja’.

The age at which most scholars still have thirty or forty years of teaching, writing, and guidance still ahead of them.

And Sayyed al-Radhi was gone.

He left behind, as we have already heard, one book.

One book that will be read until the Day of Judgment.

But he also left behind — and this is the detail that tells us something about him — something the biographical sources record with great tenderness.

He left behind no wealth.

Despite holding three of the most lucrative offices in the Abbasid administration — the Niqaba, the Amir al-Hajj, the Diwan al-Mazalim — despite the stipends, the lands, the gifts, the honours that came with those offices — Sayyed al-Radhi died without accumulating a personal fortune.

What he had earned, he had given away.

To his students.

To the poor of the Talibid family he supervised.

To the Dar al-Ilm he had founded.

To the free copying of manuscripts for young scholars.

To the support of the Hajj pilgrims he had led year after year.

A scholar who had lived Nahj al-Balagha had also died living it.

The Grief That Could Not Walk to the Grave

And here, we must pause on a detail that the biographical sources preserve with extraordinary tenderness — because it tells us something about the love between these two brothers that no list of collaborations and co-authored achievements ever could.

When Sayyed al-Radhi’s body was prepared for burial, and the community of Baghdad gathered to pray the funeral prayer, Sayyed al-Murtadha — the elder brother, the senior scholar, the man who by every custom and every expectation should have led the prayer over his own brother’s body — could not bring himself to attend.

The biographical sources tell us, quite plainly, that his grief overwhelmed him.

He could not look at the coffin.

He could not stand at the front of the congregation.

He could not, in his own words, bear what was being asked of him.

And so he withdrew — not far, but far enough.

He fled to the shrine of his ancestor Imam Musa al-Kadhim, peace and blessings be upon him, just north of Baghdad, and there, at the grave of his Imam, he grieved.

And because Sayyed al-Murtadha could not lead the funeral prayer, another man stepped in to lead it in his place.

That man was Fakhr al-Mulk — the vizier of the Abbasid caliph.

A man of the state.

A man of the ruling order.

Not a scholar of Sayyed al-Radhi’s school, not a jurist, not an Alid — but the chief minister of the government itself, stepping forward to lead the funeral prayer over one of the greatest Shi’i scholars of the age, because the dead man’s own brother could not bear to.

Let me ask you to sit with that image for a moment.

What kind of a man must Sayyed al-Radhi have been, that when he died, the vizier of the Abbasid caliphate — the government that had privately despised everything Sayyed al-Radhi stood for — would stand before the congregation of Baghdad and lead the prayer over his body?

And what kind of a love must the elder brother have felt, that he could not even stand in the back row of that prayer, and had to flee to the shrine of Imam al-Kadhim to weep?

This is how the great Sunni historian Ibn Khallikan — the thirteenth-century judge of Damascus — records the moment in his Wafayat al-A’yan.

He confirms the date, he confirms the place of death in Karkh, and he confirms the detail we have just described: that the grief of Sayyed al-Murtadha was such that he could not attend the prayer, and that Sayyed al-Radhi was, because of his station and the sheer suddenness of the loss, initially buried inside his own residence in the Karkh district of Baghdad.

The first grave of Nahj al-Balagha’s compiler was in his own home.

The Transfer to Karbala

But the grave in Karkh was not to be his final resting place.

In our tradition, there is no higher honour for a believer’s body than to rest in the sacred precincts of Karbala, in the Ha’ir — the inner sanctuary — of the shrine of Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him.

And the family of Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha — Husayni on their father’s side, tracing their lineage through Imam Musa al-Kadhim to the Master of the Martyrs himself — had already established this as their family’s final custom.

Their father, Sayyed Abu Ahmad al-Husayn al-Musawi — the great Naqib we have spoken of earlier — had himself been transferred to Karbala after his death, and buried within the sacred enclosure of his grandfather’s shrine.

And sometime after Sayyed al-Radhi’s initial burial in his Karkh residence, his body was exhumed and transferred to Karbala, where he was laid to rest beside his father, within the Ha’ir of Imam Husayn.

This is confirmed by one of the greatest commentators on Nahj al-Balagha itself — Ibn Maytham al-Bahrani, a thirteenth-century scholar whose Sharh Nahj al-Balagha is one of the classic commentaries on Sayyed al-Radhi’s compilation.

In the biographical introduction to his Sharh, Ibn Maytham records that although Sayyed al-Radhi died in Karkh, his final resting place — alongside his brother Sayyed al-Murtadha, who would join him there thirty years later — is in the precincts of Imam Husayn in Karbala.

دُفِنَ مَعَ أَخِيهِ الْمُرْتَضَى فِي جِوَارِ جَدِّهِ الْحُسَيْنِ عَلَيْهِ السَّلَامُ

“He was buried with his brother al-Murtadha in the vicinity of his grandfather al-Husayn, peace be upon him.”

— Ibn Maytham al-Bahrani (d. 679 AH / 1280 CE), Sharh Nahj al-Balagha, biographical introduction on al-Sharif al-Radhi

And the modern encyclopaedic authority Allamah Abd al-Husayn al-Amini — whose monumental work al-Ghadir gathers together virtually the entire classical historical record on the great figures of the Shi’a tradition — confirms this transfer directly in his biographical section on Sayyed al-Radhi.

Allamah al-Amini writes that many historians have recorded the transfer of Sayyed al-Radhi’s body to Karbala after his initial burial in his Karkh home, and that throughout the medieval centuries the graves of the two brothers and their father were famous destinations for pilgrims inside the Ha’ir of Imam Husayn.

ذَكَرَ جَمَاعَةٌ مِنَ الْمُؤَلِّفِينَ نَقْلَ جُثْمَانِهِ الشَّرِيفِ إِلَى كَرْبَلَاءَ الْمُعَلَّاةِ بَعْدَ دَفْنِهِ فِي دَارِهِ بِالْكَرْخِ، فَدُفِنَ إِلَى جَنْبِ وَالِدِهِ أَبِي أَحْمَدَ الْحُسَيْنِ

“A group of authors have mentioned the transfer of his noble body to the honoured Karbala after his burial in his house in Karkh — so he was buried beside his father, Abu Ahmad al-Husayn.”

— Allamah Abd al-Husayn al-Amini (d. 1390 AH / 1970 CE), al-Ghadir, Volume 4, in the biographical section on al-Sharif al-Radhi

And — because some of you may have made pilgrimage to Iraq, to Baghdad and seen, right outside the main gates of the al-Kadhimiyya shrine, two famous dome-topped structures bearing the names of Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha — let me clarify one thing.

Those shrines in al-Kadhimiyya are maqams, memorial sites, marking the place of the brothers’ original burials in their Baghdad homes.

They are sites of reverence and deserve the pilgrim’s respect.

But the bodies themselves, according to the classical historical consensus, rest not in Baghdad — but in Karbala, within the sacred precincts of the shrine of Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him, the very Grandfather in whose shadow the two brothers had asked to be laid.

There is a deep poetic closure in this.

The compiler of the words of Imam Ali rests beside the body of Imam Husayn.

The son of Sayyedah Fatimah — through a lineage stretching across centuries — returned, at the last, to the side of the son of Sayyedah Fatimah himself.

The Eulogy — To Sayyed al-Radhi

Before we close, let us stand, in our hearts, at the grave.

Let us make the short journey, together, from this gathering to Karbala.

Let us walk through the streets of the Holy City, past the pilgrims and the traders and the mourners, past the great golden dome of the Grandfather whose martyrdom we mark with our tears every Muharram, nay every day even.

Let us enter the sacred precincts of the Ha’ir.

And let us stand, in the stillness within, at two graves laid side by side — a young scholar laid beside his father, the Naqib who had walked the Alid community of Baghdad through seven turns of his office and now lay at rest beside the son who had inherited it from him.

This is where our story has led us tonight.

Not to a conclusion in a library in Baghdad.

Not to a final lecture in the Dar al-Ilm.

But to a quiet patch of soil in Karbala, where a forty-seven-year-old scholar — gone too soon, leaving an elder brother who could not even walk to his funeral — now lies in the eternal company of the Imam in whose service he spent every breath of his life.

Let us greet him.

Peace be upon you, O Sayyed Abu al-Hassan, Muhammad ibn al-Husayn al-Musawi.

Peace be upon you, O noble son of the Prophet’s household.

Peace be upon you — you who left us at forty-seven, when the scholars of your age believed you had only just begun.

Peace be upon you — you who refused a thousand dinars rather than curse a people, and who refused to hold in your heart what your tongue could not honestly say.

Peace be upon you — you who gathered the scattered words of your Grandfather from every letter, every sermon, every counsel, and bound them into a single book that we are still reading a thousand years later.

Peace be upon you — you who founded a House of Knowledge without walls between Muslim and Muslim, between Shi’a and Sunni, between believer and seeker, and who taught us by your life that knowledge is not a fortress to defend but a lamp to pass on.

Peace be upon you — you who lived Nahj al-Balagha before you compiled it, and who compiled it because you had first lived it.

Peace be upon you, O Sharif al-Radhi — the Content, the one whose name your Lord chose for you in a verse of the Qur’an, before you were ever born.

O God — we ask You, by his love of Imam Ali, by his devotion to the Ahl al-Bayt, by the book he left behind that has guided millions of Your servants — elevate his station among the righteous.

Place him beside his Grandfather in the highest Paradise.

And let every word of Nahj al-Balagha that is read until the end of time be a light that rises to his soul.

The Closing Supplication

O God — Lord of Sayyed al-Radhi, who lived forty-seven years and gave us a book that has not stopped speaking for a thousand.

We thank You, tonight, for the gift of his short life and the long shadow it has cast over every century since.

We thank You for the sermons he preserved, for the letters he gathered, for the maxims he chose, and for the silence he kept — submerging his own voice so that the voice of his ancestor could be heard.

O God — make us, in our own work, like Sayyed al-Radhi was in his.

Make us willing to disappear into the tradition we serve, rather than parading ourselves across it.

Make us, in our own short lives — and they are all short, every one of them, however long they seem — willing to do one thing well for Your sake, even if no one ever knows our name.

O God — we ask You, by Your love for Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib whose words filled this scholar’s heart, grant us tawfeeq.

Grant us success in the work You have entrusted to us.

Grant us the honour Sayyed al-Radhi carried into every act of his life — the honour that refused a thousand dinars, that refused to curse a people, that refused to hold in his heart what his tongue could not honestly say.

Let us not arrive at our own final hour with that honour traded away for the cheap currencies of this world.

And O God — for our beloved Master, the Imam of this Age, the Proof of God upon His earth, the son of al-Hasan al-Askari, peace be upon him and upon his fathers — be, in this hour and in every hour, his guardian, his protector, his leader, his helper, his guide, and his watchful eye.

Hasten his relief.

Make his hardship easy.

And count us, by Your mercy, among those who labour, as Sayyed al-Radhi laboured, to prepare the ground for the day of his return.

For the occultation continues, O Lord, because we are not yet ready.

Make us ready.

Let every word we speak, every truth we defend, every act of service we offer to Your creation — be a stone we lay in the foundation of the community he will one day lead.

Let our households become like the households of the Naqib’s family in Karkh — where the words of the Imams were read with such love that the children grew up unable to imagine a life that did not serve them.

And O God — when our own time comes, as it came for Sayyed al-Radhi at forty-seven, grant us husn al-khatima.

A good ending.

The ending of those whom You have chosen and who have chosen You.

Let us depart this world with our work given to those who would carry it forward, and our hearts at peace with the One who created us.

Let us, by Your mercy, be remembered as Sayyed al-Radhi is remembered tonight — not for the wealth we accumulated, but for the wealth we gave away.

Not for the offices we held, but for the dignity with which we held them.

Not for the books we wrote with our own names on the cover, but for the truth we transmitted from those who were greater than us.

And let us be reunited, by Your mercy, with the ones we have loved in this life and with the ones we have only loved from afar — beside Sayyed al-Radhi and beside his Grandfather, in a Paradise where the soil of Karbala lies open beneath our feet and the face of the Imam, may our souls be his ransom and may You, O God, hasten his return, is the first sight our eyes meet.

O God, send Your blessings upon Muhammad and the family of Muhammad — and hasten their relief — and may their enemies, all of them, be excluded from Your mercy.

Amen, O Lord, Sustainer of the Universes.

Amen, O Most Merciful of the Merciful.

Teaser for Next Week

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

Preamble

Tonight, we do not begin with a crisis, or a migration, or a martyrdom.

We begin with ten words.

Ten words spoken by Amir al-Mu’minin, Imam Ali, peace and blessings be upon him, over a thousand years before we gathered here this evening.

Ten words that diagnose a disease of the human heart with such precision that every age since has found itself in their mirror.

النَّاسُ أَعْدَاءُ مَا جَهِلُوا

“People are the enemies of what they do not know.”

— Nahj al-Balaghah, compiled by al-Sharif al-Radhi, Maxims/Sayings (al-Hikam), Saying 172

Ten words.

And yet within them is the entire story of the two men we will meet tonight.

Two brothers.

Born of one mother.

Taught by one teacher.

Raised in one of the most dangerous and most glorious cities the Muslim world has ever produced — Baghdad, in the fourth and fifth centuries after the Hijrah.

A city where philosophers walked alongside fanatics.

Where libraries were built in one generation and burned in the next.

Where a Shi’i family could be honoured in the courts of power and threatened in the streets in the same week.

Tonight we meet Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha.

The one who gave us Nahj al-Balagha — the book from which, moments ago, we recited.

And the one who taught the man who would build Najaf.

These two brothers stood in an arena surrounded by scholars and theologians who did not know them, did not understand them, and in their ignorance — opposed them.

And the answer these two brothers gave to that hostility was not retreat.

It was not silence.

It was not compromise.

Their answer was knowledge.

Refined.

Defended.

Transmitted.

And written down — so that a thousand years later, on a Wednesday evening far from the banks of the Tigris, we can still sit together and hear the words of Imam Ali preserved by one brother, defended by the other, and tested in the fire of every opposing school of their age.

النَّاسُ أَعْدَاءُ مَا جَهِلُوا

“People are the enemies of what they do not know.”

— Nahj al-Balaghah, compiled by al-Sharif al-Radhi, Maxims/Sayings (al-Hikam), Saying 172

And the response of the scholar to that enmity, Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha will teach us tonight, is to teach.

Even when those around them do not wish to learn.

Especially when they do not wish to learn.

Video of the Majlis (Sermon/Lecture)

Audio of the Majlis (Sermon/Lecture)

A Note to the Congregation

Before we go further tonight, a word about where we are going — because what you are about to begin is not a single session.

When we first sat down to write tonight’s majlis, we expected, as we have done in every previous session of this sub-series, to deliver one complete portrait — birth to legacy — in a single evening.

But as the work unfolded, something became clear.

The story of these two brothers is not a story that can be told in one sitting.

It is too rich.

It carries too much that the Shi’a community needs to hear, and too much that — if we rushed it — would land as a list of names rather than as the living tradition we are trying to honour.

The two brothers themselves lived their lives across more than eighty years.

They produced books that shaped a thousand years of scholarship.

They trained students who carried their inheritance from Baghdad to Tripoli to Aleppo to Najaf.

They lived inside an intellectual world populated by Ibn Sina and Qadi Abd al-Jabbar and the rising shadow of al-Ghazali.

They were buried in Karbala beside their father, beside their Grandfather, the Master of the Martyrs.

And what their story finally asks us — at its end — is to think honestly about the difference between religion and the abuse of religion; the difference between the genuine theological commitments of Sunni and Shi’a believers across history, and the political projects that have used both traditions as cloaks for worldly ambition.

That is not a small ask.

And it deserves more than the closing five minutes of an exhausted majlis.

So we have made a decision.

You will recall that in Session 64, when we first began The Architecture of Guidance, we said this to you:

And we said:

Tonight, we honour that same principle again.

The story of Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha will be told across four sessions, not one.

Tonight — Session 65 — we meet them as boys.

We meet their mother and their father.

We meet the lineage they carried in their blood, and the household that prepared them.

We watch the dream that brought them to Shaykh al-Mufid.

And we stand with them at the threshold of their lives, the soil prepared, ready for what was about to grow.

Next week — Session 66 — we will walk the full life of the younger brother, Sayyed al-Radhi: the poet who became a compiler, the scholar who lived Nahj al-Balagha before he gave it to the world, the public man who refused a thousand dinars rather than betray his principles.

We will walk him to his early grave at the age of forty-seven, and we will stand at his funeral as the vizier of the Abbasid caliphate himself steps in to lead the prayer the elder brother could not bear to lead.

The week after — Session 67 — we will walk the full life of the elder brother, Sayyed al-Murtadha: thirty years of carrying the work forward alone, the five books that became the foundations of every Hawza in the world, the dream through which his great ancestor gave him a title he refused before he accepted, the library of eighty thousand volumes, and the four students he dispatched across the Mediterranean to plant the seed in soil that fire could not reach.

And in the fourth and final week — Session 68 — we will meet the world that surrounded them: Ibn Sina and the Mu’tazilites and the rising Ash’ariyya and the looming shadow of al-Ghazali.

We will watch the library burn.

We will see what survived the burning.

And we will pause — gravely, honestly — to ask what this whole story is for: what it teaches us about the difference between the tradition we have inherited and the political projects, ancient and modern, Shi’a and Sunni and beyond, that have draped themselves in religion’s clothing while serving entirely different masters.

We will close that fourth week, by God’s permission, at the graves of the two brothers in Karbala, with our eyes raised toward the One in Whose service they lived and died — our beloved Imam, the Mahdi of this age, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return.

This is not a delay.

It is the work the material demands.

And it is, in its own way, a continuation of the principle Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha lived by themselves: that knowledge transmitted in haste is knowledge that does not transmit at all.

So tonight: two boys.

One mother.

One teacher.

One household where, every day, the words of Imam Ali — their ancestor — were spoken as though the Commander of the Faithful himself might walk through the door.

Let us begin.

Introduction

Tonight is the fifth session of our sub-series, The Architecture of Guidance.

We began this journey some weeks ago by asking a question — how did the Marja’iyyah we know today, the Hawza in Qom, the Hawza in Najaf, the scholarly hierarchy that anchors our community — how did it come to be?

Who built it?

What crises shaped it?

And through whose hands was the light of the Imams carried, in the long night of occultation?

Tonight we begin to answer a part of that question by meeting two men.

Two men who, unlike every figure we have met in this sub-series so far, come to us not as individuals but as a pair.

Brothers.

Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha.

And here, before we go any further, a small clarification.

Some of you will have heard these two men referred to by a different title — as Sharif al-Radhi and Sharif al-Murtadha.

And some may have asked, quite reasonably — was it not Sharif al-Radhi who compiled Nahj al-Balagha?

How can it be the same man?

It is the same man.

Sayyed and Sharif are two honourifics given to the descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, his family and his righteous companions.

Both signify nobility of lineage.

Sharif, from the Arabic sharafa — to be elevated, to be honoured.

Sayyed, from sada — to be a master, a chief, a leader.

In the age we are entering tonight — fourth and fifth-century Baghdad — Sharif was the dominant honorific used for the Alid nobility of the Abbasid capital.

And in fact, these two brothers’ father, Sayyed Abu Ahmad Husayn ibn Musa, held one of the highest offices an Alid could hold in that world.

He was the Naqib al-Talibiyin — and let me pause to explain what that office meant, because it tells you much about the world into which our two brothers were born.

The Naqib al-Talibiyin was the official overseer of all the descendants of Abu Talib — which, in practice, meant all the descendants of Imam Ali and of his brothers.

In the Abbasid administrative system, and later under the Buyids, the Alids were a recognised class — formally registered, formally represented, formally entitled to certain stipends from the pious endowments made for the descendants of the Prophet.

The Naqib was the man who maintained the genealogical registers, guarding the lineage against impostors.

He settled disputes within the Alid community.

He represented their interests at the caliph’s court.

He administered the endowments that supported them.

In a city where, in the wrong decade, being a Shi’i could still get a man killed in the street — the Naqib was the Alid community’s official voice in the halls of power.

So when we say their father was a Sharif, we do not mean only that he carried the blood.

We mean he was a recognised, titled, state-registered representative of the Prophet’s descendants in the capital of the Islamic world.

And our two brothers were born into that house, grew up under that weight of expectation, and would both, in turn, later in life, hold that same office themselves.

So the biographical sources of their own age, and the centuries immediately after, recorded our two men as Sharif al-Radhi and Sharif al-Murtadha.

Over time, regional custom shifted.

In the Hijaz, Sharif came to cluster around the Hasani line — most famously in the ruling Sharifs of Mecca, whose descendants went on to establish royal houses across several modern Arab states.

And in the broader Shi’a world, Sayyed gradually displaced Sharif as the universal honorific for descendants of the Prophet — regardless of which Imam they trace through.

So tonight I will use Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha, in keeping with our own Shi’a usage.

But when you hear Sharif al-Radhi and Sharif al-Murtadha elsewhere, know that it is the same men.

Same lineage.

Same brothers.

And their lineage, for the record, is Husayni through both parents — their father’s line traces to Imam Musa al-Kadhim, peace be upon him, their mother’s to Imam Ali Zayn al-Abidin, peace be upon him.

They carry in their blood the bond to two of the Imams whose legacy they would spend their lives defending.

But let me pause here, because there is a danger in everything I have just said about titles and lineages.

The title Sayyed, the title Sharif, the blood tie to the noblest family that ever walked this earth — it is an honour.

It is not a guarantee.

And the respect we owe to the descendants of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family and his righteous companions — that respect is owed in love, in care, in kindness.

It was never meant to be a claim to privilege, nor a caste standing above the rest of the believers.

This is not my inference.

It is what the Qur’an itself teaches.

In Surah al-Hujurat, God sets the measure for all human honour in a single verse:

إِنَّ أَكْرَمَكُمْ عِندَ اللَّهِ أَتْقَاكُمْ

“Indeed, the most noble of you in the sight of God is the most righteous of you.”

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

The most noble — akramakum — is the one with the most taqwa — righteousness, God-awareness.

Not the one with the noblest blood.

Not the one with the oldest family name.

Not the one whose lineage traces to the Prophet.

The one with the most God-consciousness.

And lest anyone imagine that the sacred lineages are somehow exempt from this measure, the Qur’an, in Surah al-Baqarah, addresses that very question head-on.

When Prophet Abraham (Ibrahim), peace be upon him, was tested by his Lord, and he passed every test, his Lord said to him:

وَإِذِ ابْتَلَىٰ إِبْرَاهِيمَ رَبُّهُ بِكَلِمَاتٍ فَأَتَمَّهُنَّ ۖ قَالَ إِنِّي جَاعِلُكَ لِلنَّاسِ إِمَامًا ۖ قَالَ وَمِن ذُرِّيَّتِي ۖ قَالَ لَا يَنَالُ عَهْدِي الظَّالِمِينَ

“And [remember] when his Lord tested Abraham with certain commands, and he fulfilled them, He said: ‘Indeed, I am making you an Imam for humanity.’ [Abraham] said: ‘And from my descendants?’ He said: ‘My covenant does not reach the wrongdoers.’”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow), #2, Verse 124

Even Abraham — the Khalil, the Friend of God — could not bequeath his sacred station as a bloodline inheritance.

When he asked, gently, lovingly,

— the answer was not a simple yes.

The answer was:

لَا يَنَالُ عَهْدِي الظَّالِمِينَ

My covenant does not reach the unjust.

— Qur’an, Surah al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow), #2, Verse 124

Even if they are of Prophet Abraham’s line.

Even if they are of Prophet Muhammad’s line.

Even if they wear the title Sayyed or Sharif upon their name.

This is why our tradition has always been careful to separate the blessing of lineage from the measure of a person.

A descendant of the Prophet who lives with taqwa — God-consciousness, who serves the people, who carries the weight of the name with humility — that person honours the ancestor they inherited.

And a descendant who claims the title but forgets the example — remember who the example was.

It was Imam Ali, peace and blessings be upon him, who, when he ruled half the known world, kept the mud-brick house, wore the patched cloak, and ate his bread with salt.

The ancestor of our two brothers tonight.

If the ancestor refused the palaces of his own age in the name of God, what measure should we take of any descendant, in any age, who trades the example for the title alone?

And that is why, a thousand years after their deaths, we still speak the names of Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha with reverence.

Not because of the blood in their veins, which they did not choose — but because of what they did with it.

They used their name to teach.

To defend.

To carry the words of Imam Ali forward for every generation that would come after them — including ours.

Born four years apart.

Raised in the same house.

Taught by the same teacher.

Buried in the same city.

And between them, in the space of a single generation, they gave our tradition two gifts that cannot be separated.

One brother compiled the book that has been called the gateway to Imam Ali himself — Nahj al-Balagha.

The other brother became the undisputed leader of the Shi’a for twenty-three years after their teacher’s death, and trained the man who would found the Hawza of Najaf.

That is why they come to us, across these four sessions, together.

Because their story — and the tradition’s debt to them — cannot be told apart.

Our structure across this four-part journey will follow the rhythm we have settled into across this sub-series.

Three movements, distributed across four weeks.

Formation. Contribution. Departure and legacy.

Tonight, in the Formation, we will meet the mother whose decision changed a civilisation.

In the Contribution — across Sessions 66 and 67 — we will meet Nahj al-Balagha; we will meet Alam al-Huda, the Banner of Guidance; and we will meet the four students through whom the inheritance of one teacher reached every corner of the Mediterranean and Persian worlds.

In Session 68 we will step into the intellectual battlefield that surrounded them — a world populated by Ibn Sina, the Mu’tazilites, the Ash’arites, and soon after them the towering figure of al-Ghazali.

A world of thought so fierce, so crowded, and so unforgiving that only the best-trained minds could survive in it at all — let alone stand at its centre.

And in the Departure, in that same fourth week, we will follow the thread as it passes, from these two brothers, into the hand of the one student who — when Baghdad itself was no longer safe — would carry it south, to the shrine of Imam Ali, and build there a seminary that has stood for nearly one thousand years.

But all of that lies ahead.

Tonight, we begin where every story must begin: at the beginning, but before that, let us recap the previous session.

Recap

Last week, we sat with a man who, by the end of his life, had become the most important Shi’a scholar in the world.

Shaykh al-Mufid.

The Beneficial One.

We followed him from his origins in Ukbara — a small town on the banks of the Tigris, about sixty kilometres north of Baghdad, in what is today the Saladin Governorate of Iraq — to the minbar — pulpit — of the greatest scholarly authority of his age.

We saw how he took the tradition that Shaykh al-Kulayni and Shaykh al-Saduq had preserved — preserved in hadith, preserved in text — and gave it a voice.

The voice of rational theology.

Of trained argumentation.

Of scholars who could walk into the courtrooms of the Buyid caliphs, and into the mosques and debating halls of Karkh, and stand their ground in any language the opposing school wished to speak.

And we ended last week with a dream.

A dream in which, as the biographical sources record it, a woman came to Shaykh al-Mufid in his sleep — and she was Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, peace and blessings be upon her.

And she said to him:

When Shaykh al-Mufid awoke, he rose and walked to the mosque of al-Karkh — the Shi’i quarter of Baghdad.

And there, waiting for him, was a mother.

With her two young sons.

Asking him to teach them.

Those two sons are tonight’s session.

The chain now has a shape.

Shaykh al-Kulayni and Shaykh al-Saduq — they preserved.

Shaykh al-Mufid — he defended and systematised.

And now, in this generation, Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha inherit the torch.

Theologically.

Politically.

Intellectually.

Literarily.

The torch that will pass, through Sayyed al-Murtadha, into the hand of the student who will carry it out of Baghdad altogether when Baghdad itself begins to burn.

That is where we pick up tonight.

The Formation — Two Sons, One Mother, One Teacher

Let us begin at the beginning.

In the city of Baghdad, in the year 355 after the Hijra — which, in the reckoning of the West, is the year 966 of the common era — a boy was born into a noble house on the west bank of the Tigris.

His father named him Ali.

The world would come to know him as Sharif al-Murtadha, and later, as Sayyed al-Murtadha, Alam al-Huda — the Banner of Guidance.

Four years later, in the year 359 of the Hijra, a second son was born to the same mother and the same father.

His father named him Muhammad.

The world would come to know him as Sharif al-Radi, Sayyed al-Radhi — and every student of the Arabic language, of Islamic thought, of political philosophy, of spiritual reflection, of the art of eloquence itself — for a thousand years after his death, and until the end of this world — would quietly owe him a debt.

For the one book he would give them before he was buried.

Nahj al-Balagha. The Peak of Eloquence.

A book that the great Sunni reformer of al-Azhar, Shaykh Muhammad Abduh, published and championed — the same Shaykh Muhammad Abduh who would later become the Grand Mufti of Egypt, and one of the most influential Sunni reformers of the nineteenth century.

A book whose most comprehensive classical commentary runs to twenty volumes and was written, not by a Shi’i, but by a Mu’tazilite scholar of the seventh century of the Hijra — Ibn Abi’l-Hadid — a man who could not put the book down even though he did not share its compiler’s creed.

A book whose passages Arab school children have memorised for a thousand years to learn what their language, at its highest register, sounds like.

A book whose Letter 53, to Malik al-Ashtar on the governance of Egypt, is today studied in departments of political philosophy as one of the most comprehensive treatises on just rulership ever produced in the classical world.

And, in our own age, a book that has taken its place on the shelves of the great academic houses of the West.

The most recent scholarly edition and translation of Nahj al-Balagha was published only two years ago, in the year 2024 of the common era, by the Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford, and brought out by Brill of Leiden — one of the oldest and most respected academic presses in the world, founded in the year 1683.

The Emeritus Professor of Arabic at Oxford called the work a major achievement and described Nahj al-Balagha itself as one of the most revered Arabic texts among both Sunni and Shi’a Muslims alike.

In other words: a book that has outgrown every boundary its compiler might have imagined for it.

A book that belongs, today, not only to the Shi’a, not only to the Muslims, not only to the Arabic-speaking world — but to the heritage of humanity itself.

And the man who gave it to us — who collected, arranged, preserved, and published these words of his ancestor when no one else had thought to do so — is the boy whose name his father had just whispered into his ear as the call to prayer rose over fourth-century Baghdad.

And a word about those names themselves — al-Murtadha and al-Radhi — because, like the title al-Mufid that we sat with last week, these were not random honourifics.

They were chosen.

And they were chosen to carry meaning.

Both names come from a single root in the Arabic language — the root ر-ض-ي, r-dh-y — a root that turns, in every direction you look at it, around a single idea1.

Divine pleasure.

Approval.

Contentment.

Acceptance.

But the two names take that single root in two different directions.

Al-Radhi is the active form.

It means the one who is pleased, the one who is content.

The one doing the pleasing.

Pleased with what God has decreed.

Pleased with his portion of this world.

Pleased in the way the Qur’an speaks of the returning soul at the end of Surah al-Fajr — one of the most beloved passages in the entire Book:

يَا أَيَّتُهَا النَّفْسُ الْمُطْمَئِنَّةُ ۝ ارْجِعِي إِلَىٰ رَبِّكِ رَاضِيَةً مَّرْضِيَّةً

“O soul at peace. Return to your Lord — well-pleased, and well-pleasing.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Fajr (the Chapter of the Dawn), #89, Verses 27–28

Radhiyah.

The soul that is pleased with God.

From the same form as al-Radhi.

And al-Murtadha is the passive form — but from a deeper turn of the same verb.

It means the one approved, the one chosen, the one whom God has selected.

Not the one doing the pleasing — but the one who has been found pleasing.

It is the word the Qur’an uses when it speaks of the messengers God has chosen:

عَالِمُ الْغَيْبِ فَلَا يُظْهِرُ عَلَىٰ غَيْبِهِ أَحَدًا ۝ إِلَّا مَنِ ارْتَضَىٰ مِن رَّسُولٍ

“He is the Knower of the Unseen, and He does not disclose His Unseen to anyone — Except to him whom He has approved (chosen) as a messenger…”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Jinn (the Chapter of the Jinn) #72, Verses 26–27

So here are two names, from the same root, pointing at two faces of the same divine reality.

One son named for pleasing God.

The other son named for being chosen by God.

The two faces of one coin.

And together — given by the same father to his two sons — they drew from the same well.

A father’s prayer, whispered at the hour of their naming.

That these two boys, born into the heaviest lineage a Muslim could carry, would grow up to be pleased with God in every circumstance — and pleasing to God in every act.

That whatever this world threw at them — wealth or poverty, honour or humiliation, power or exile — they would stand at the end of their lives as the kind of souls to whom the Qur’an addresses its gentlest invitation:

It was the prayer of a father.

And — as we shall see across these four sessions — the prayer was answered.

Their father was Sayyed Abu Ahmad Husayn ibn Musa al-Musawi — the Naqib al-Talibiyin of Baghdad we have just spoken of.

A man of such standing in the Abbasid capital that when disputes broke out between the caliph and the Buyid princes, he was among the few trusted enough to mediate between them.

Seven times, across the course of his long life, Abu Ahmad held the position of Naqib.

Seven times he stepped away from it or was removed by political turbulence.

And seven times he was called back to it — because no other Alid in Baghdad could hold it as he did.

Their mother was Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn — a noblewoman of scholarly family in her own right.

Her father was al-Nasir al-Saghir, and her grandfather was al-Nasir al-Kabir.

Let me pause here to explain these names, because they will mean little to most of us today but they carried enormous weight in the Shi’i world of the fourth century of the Hijra.

Al-Nasir al-Saghir — the Younger al-Nasir — was a prominent Alid chieftain of northern Iran, a descendant of Imam Ali Zayn al-Abidin, peace be upon him, through his son Umar al-Ashraf.

His title, al-Saghir, distinguished him from his own father — al-Nasir al-Kabir, the Elder al-Nasir — better known to history as al-Hasan al-Atrush.

And al-Hasan al-Atrush was, in his age, something extraordinary: he was a scholar, a poet, a jurist, a narrator of hadith, and at the same time a warrior who, some fifty years before our two brothers were born, had led the Alids of his region to establish an independent state in the lands of Tabaristan — the coastal region south of the Caspian Sea, in what is today the Mazandaran province of northern Iran.

He had died in battle in the year 304 of the Hijra, fighting to preserve what he had built.

And his memory — the memory of an Alid who had carried the honour of his lineage not just in his blood, but in his scholarship, his poetry, his sword, and ultimately his life — was still living memory in the Alid households of Baghdad when his great-grandsons were born.

This was Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn’s inheritance — paternal and maternal alike, for she was also the granddaughter of scholars on her mother’s side.

And as the biographical sources record her, she was a woman who knew exactly what her two sons carried in their veins, and exactly what she wanted them to become.

This was the household into which these two brothers were born.

A household of wealth, yes — but wealth in Baghdad in the fourth century of the Hijra was never secure.

A household of political standing, yes — but political standing in that city, in that age, was a position at the mouth of a lion’s cave.

The Abbasid caliph sat on the throne, but the Buyid princes held the real power.

The Shi’i quarter of Karkh and the Sunni quarter of Bab al-Basra would, in the wrong month, descend into open street fighting.

Scholars would walk from their houses to the mosque past the ashes of a library that had been burned the night before.

And in the middle of all of it, an Alid family was expected — by the caliph, by the Buyids, by the Shi’i community, by the wider ummah — to produce leaders.

Scholars.

Judges.

Men who could hold the line.

Into that world, these two young boys were born.

Two boys who, it was clear very early, were not ordinary.

The Dream

We ended last week with a dream.

And we end this week’s opening with the same dream — because last week it was told from the perspective of the teacher, and this week it must be told from the perspective of the mother.

The biographical sources record the episode with remarkable consistency.

Shaykh al-Mufid — whom we met last week, the Beneficial One, the most learned Shi’i scholar of his age — was asleep one night in his home in Baghdad.

And in his sleep, he saw a woman come to him.

And the woman was Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, peace and blessings be upon her — the daughter of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family and his righteous companions, the mother of our Imams, the Mistress of the Women of the Worlds.

And she was holding the hands of her two young sons, al-Hasan and al-Husayn, peace be upon them.

And she said to Shaykh al-Mufid:

And the Shaykh awoke.

As the biographical sources tell us, he was startled, disturbed, bewildered.

What could such a dream mean?

He rose, performed his prayers, and — as was his habit — walked from his home to the mosque of al-Karkh to begin his day’s teaching.

And as he approached the mosque, he saw, waiting at the entrance, a woman.

She was surrounded by attendants, as befitted a noblewoman of her rank.

Her two young sons stood beside her.

And she spoke to Shaykh al-Mufid with the directness of a mother who knows that the man she is addressing is the most important teacher in the city, and that her time with him is short.

The two boys were Ali and Muhammad — Sayyed al-Murtadha and Sayyed al-Radhi.

The mother was Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn.

And Shaykh al-Mufid, looking at the two children before him and remembering the dream he had just awoken from, understood what had happened.

The biographical sources tell us simply: he wept.

He recounted the dream to her.

And he took them on as his students.

The earliest and most detailed preservation of the incident reaches us through Ibn Abi al-Hadid — the great Mu’tazilite commentator we met earlier tonight — who recorded it in his celebrated commentary on Nahj al-Balagha:

فَلَمَّا تَعَالَى النَّهَارُ فِي صَبِيحَةِ تِلْكَ اللَّيْلَةِ الَّتِي رَأَى فِيهَا الرُّؤْيَا، دَخَلَتْ عَلَيْهِ الْمَسْجِدَ فَاطِمَةُ بِنْتُ النَّاصِرِ، وَحَوْلَهَا جَوَارِيهَا، وَبَيْنَ يَدَيْهَا ابْنَاهَا مُحَمَّدٌ الرَّضِيُّ وَعَلِيٌّ الْمُرْتَضَى صَغِيرَيْنِ، فَقَامَ إِلَيْهَا وَسَلَّمَ عَلَيْهَا، فَقَالَتْ لَهُ: أَيُّهَا الشَّيْخُ، هَذَانِ وَلَدَايَ قَدْ أَحْضَرْتُهُمَا لِتُعَلِّمَهُمَا الْفِقْهَ، فَبَكَى أَبُو عَبْدِ اللَّهِ وَقَصَّ عَلَيْهَا الْمَنَامَ، وَتَوَلَّى تَعْلِيمَهُمَا.

“The next morning, after the night in which he had seen the dream, Fatima bint al-Nasir entered the mosque to see him, surrounded by her servants, and with her two young sons, Muhammad al-Radhi and Ali al-Murtadha, walking before her. He rose and greeted her. She said to him: O Shaykh, these are my two sons, whom I have brought to you so that you may teach them jurisprudence. Abu Abdillah wept, and recounted to her the dream, and undertook their education.”

— Ibn Abi al-Hadid, Sharh Nahj al-Balagha, Volume 1, on the compiler’s biography; cited by Allamah Majlisi in Bihar al-Anwar

And this account was carried forward, centuries later, into the great Shi’i encyclopaedic tradition by Allamah al-Majlisi — who we will meet as we progress through this series, who gathered it into his monumental Bihar al-Anwar — the Oceans of Lights — which even today sits on the shelf of every serious student of our tradition as the largest compilation of Shi’i narrations ever assembled.

Through Allamah al-Majlisi’s collection, the story of a mother, a teacher, and a dream was preserved for us, a thousand years later, in this very majlis.

And thus began a relationship between one teacher and two students that would, in a single generation, reshape the intellectual landscape of Shi’ism.

Lessons Woven In

Pause with me here for a moment, before we leave the mother and her two boys at the mosque of al-Karkh.

What this episode tells us — and it tells us something that our tradition has known for fourteen centuries and that our age has largely forgotten — is that the family is the first institution of learning.

Before the madrasah, before the Hawza, before the seminary, before any formal institution of any kind, there is the mother who decides that her sons will be something.

And there is the father whose standing gives them the means.

And there is the household whose atmosphere teaches them what to value before they know the word for value.

Had Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn not made the decision she made that morning, there would be no Nahj al-Balagha as we know it today.

There would be no Alam al-Huda to lead the Shi’a after Shaykh al-Mufid’s death.

There would be no Shaykh al-Tusi trained as he was trained — because Shaykh al-Tusi would train under Sayyed al-Murtadha for twenty-three years.

The entire chain — the entire scholarly lineage we are tracing in this sub-series — hinged, at that one moment, on the decision of a mother to walk her children to the mosque.

And let me say a word to the parents in this gathering, because there is nothing more important I could say tonight.

The pursuit of knowledge in our children begins long before the first day of school.

It begins in what we allow in our homes.

In what we consume in front of our children.

In which scholars we listen to at the dinner table and which distractions we refuse to make space for.

In whether the first book in a child’s hand is a book the angels would smile upon, or something that will rot them from the inside.

Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn did not take her children to the mosque of al-Karkh that morning on a whim.

She had been preparing them for that moment, in the quiet of her home, for years.

And let me be plain here, because the age we are living in has made this lesson urgent in a way that previous generations perhaps did not feel with the same weight.

We are raising our children in a world where the institutions that were, a generation or two ago, the natural partners of the family in the formation of a child — have in many places drifted far from that partnership.

Drifted into territory that, if we are honest with ourselves, no serious believing parent can ignore.

Our schools, particularly in the West — and not least here in the United Kingdom — have become places where children are increasingly formed in ideas and ideologies that their parents never consented to.

Where the fundamentals — language, mathematics, the sciences, the humanities, the history of civilisations — compete for air with the preoccupations of the moment.

Agendas that confuse children about their own bodies, their own identities, the most basic questions of who they are — and do so at ages where a child cannot yet process such weight.

Where, in some cases, schools have been advised not to tell parents about changes their own child is going through.

And where, under government programmes framed in the language of safeguarding, teachers are placed in the role of watching for signs of what is called “extremism” — so that a child’s innocent mention at school of a religious conviction, a political concern, a love for the people of Palestine, a love for the Ahl al-Bayt — can find its way into a file, without the parent ever knowing.

Let me be clear, so that no one misunderstands me.

I am not speaking against our teachers.

I know many of them, and many of them are themselves alarmed at what they are being asked to deliver.

I am not saying there is no such thing as abuse — there is, and real abuse must be confronted.

I am not saying schools have no role in protecting children — they do, and we thank God for them.

What I am saying is this: the cure for abuse cannot be the dismantling of the trust between parent and child.

The cure cannot be the construction of a wall between a child and the first educators God appointed for them — which is the mother and the father.

Because when that wall is built, on an industrial scale, across a whole generation, we do not need to speculate about where it leads.

The research is already in.

The children most at risk in any age are not the children of believing, attentive parents who stayed close — they are the children who were severed, emotionally, ideologically, spiritually, from the adults who loved them most, and who were then handed over to whatever the age was pushing upon them.

And so the burden this places on us, in this age, is the same burden that fell on Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn, a thousand years ago.

We cannot outsource the formation of our children.

We must know what they are being taught.

We must stay in conversation with them.

We must be the mother who walked her sons to the mosque of al-Karkh — and not the parent who handed them to a stranger and hoped for the best.

The tradition of our Imams has always placed the family — not the state, not the institution — the family, at the centre of a child’s formation.

That is why Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn’s story is in this script tonight.

Because what she did in the fourth century of the Hijra, every believing parent in every age is being asked to do again, in whatever form their age demands.

And there is one more lesson — and it is a lesson about Shaykh al-Mufid, and through him about every teacher who will ever sit before a student.

Shaykh al-Mufid could have turned the mother away.

He was the busiest scholar in Baghdad.

He had hundreds of students waiting for his time.

A dream is a subjective experience; he could have dismissed it as coincidence, or stress, or the overactive imagination of an overworked man.

But he did not.

He saw the mother at the gate, he saw the two children, he remembered what he had been shown, and — in the language of the biographical sources — he wept.

And he took them.

Every scholar listening to this tonight, and every teacher of any subject, take this into your heart.

The students who come to you are sometimes just students.

And sometimes they are what Shaykh al-Mufid saw at the gate of the mosque that morning.

You will not always know which is which.

Treat every one of them as though they might be.

The Training Under Shaykh al-Mufid

The two brothers would train under Shaykh al-Mufid for years.

And as they trained, something became clear to their teacher that the biographical sources record with some tenderness.

The two brothers, though raised in the same house by the same parents and taught by the same teacher — were very different men.

Sayyed al-Murtadha, the elder, was the systematiser.

The rationalist.

The one who would take a doctrine, examine it from every angle, and construct around it a defensive architecture so thorough that no opponent would find an opening.

His was the mind of the kalam theologian — patient, methodical, unemotional, devastating when challenged.

By the time Shaykh al-Mufid’s death arrived, Sayyed al-Murtadha was ready to inherit not just the Shaykh’s students, but his methodology — and push it further.

Sayyed al-Radhi was a different soul altogether.

The younger brother was the poet.

The literary genius.

The one whose gift was not the construction of arguments but the capture of language.

From his teenage years, he composed poetry that his contemporaries considered the finest of the age.

His ear for Arabic was extraordinary.

His sensibility for the rhythm and weight of words was, as the sources tell us, unmatched among his peers.

He could have spent his life as a poet in the courts of the Buyid princes and been remembered, a thousand years later, only as a great poet of his age.

Instead, he used that gift in the service of something no one else, before or since, has quite managed to do.

But that story belongs to next week.

For now, let us leave them here.

Two boys.

Two gifts.

One mother, one father, one teacher.

And a household in which, every day, the words of Imam Ali — their ancestor and their Imam — were spoken as though the Commander of the Faithful himself might walk through the door.

The soil was prepared.

Now, God willing, we watch what grew in it.

A Closing Reflection

Before we close tonight, let us sit, for one quiet moment, with what we have just walked through.

Because everything the brothers will become — everything we will spend the next three weeks unpacking — was already there, in seed, in this opening session.

It was there in a mother’s decision to walk her children to a mosque.

It was there in a father’s careful choice of names that would carry his prayer for them across a thousand years.

It was there in a teacher’s willingness to weep at a dream and accept its summons.

It was there in a household where the words of an ancestor were spoken with such love that the children grew up unable to imagine a life that did not serve those words.

And here, is the question this opening session leaves with us — and the question I want you to carry with you, from this gathering tonight, into your homes, into your week, into the choices you will make tomorrow morning over breakfast with your own children, into the conversations you will have at the dinner table, into the things you will allow into your home and the things you will refuse to allow.

What seed is being planted in your household tonight?

Not the household of Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn in fourth-century Baghdad.

Yours.

In Manchester, in Birmingham, in Bournemouth, in Leicester, in London, in Toronto, in Sydney, in Detroit, in Bangsri, in Martinique, in whatever city this majlis reaches.

What is the soil in your home, and what is being planted in it?

Because the brothers who are going to give us Nahj al-Balagha and the foundations of every Hawza in the world — they did not begin as scholars.

They began as boys.

In a house.

With a mother.

With a father.

With names whispered into their ears at the call to prayer.

And with a household that knew, from the day they were born, that what was being raised within those walls was not a private matter.

It was the future of a tradition.

The same is true, in your house and mine.

The future of this tradition — the future of the community that the Imam, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return, will find waiting for him when the day comes — is being shaped, this week, in households like ours.

May God grant us, every one of us, the eyes Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn had, to see what our children might become.

May God grant us the courage she had, to do what is needed to prepare them for it.

And may God grant us the wisdom Shaykh al-Mufid had, to recognise — when the moment comes, in whatever form it takes — that what is standing at our gate is not what it appears to be on the surface, but something the Lord of the Worlds has placed before us as a trust.

The Closing Supplication

O God — Lord of Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha, and Lord of Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn before them, and Lord of every mother and every father who has ever raised a child to love You and to love Your Friends.

We thank You, tonight, for the gift of the two brothers whose story we have only just begun.

We thank You for the mother who walked them to the mosque, and for the father who whispered their names into their ears, and for the teacher who wept at a dream and took the burden of their formation upon his shoulders.

O God — make our households like the household of Sayyedah Fatima bint Husayn.

Make our names — the names we give our children, the names we live our own lives by — names that carry Your prayer for us across whatever years You grant us in this world.

Make us, in the homes You have entrusted to us, the parents that those children deserve.

O God — we ask You, by the love You have for the descendants of Your Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family and his righteous companions — grant us tawfeeq.

Grant us success in our endeavours.

Grant us the rigour, the patience, the courage, and the humility that Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha carried into every act of their lives.

Let us not waste the days You have given us.

Let us not arrive at our final hour with the work undone.

And O God — for our beloved Master, the Imam of this Age, the Proof of God upon His earth, the son of al-Hasan al-Askari, peace be upon him and upon his fathers — be, in this hour and in every hour, his guardian, his protector, his leader, his helper, his guide, and his watchful eye.

Hasten his relief.

Make his hardship easy.

And count us, by Your mercy, among those who labour, as Sayyed al-Radhi and Sayyed al-Murtadha laboured, to prepare the ground for the day of his return.

For the occultation continues, O Lord, because we are not yet ready.

Make us ready.

Let every act of our lives — every word taught to a child, every truth spoken in love, every household built on Your remembrance — be a stone we lay in the foundation of the community he will one day lead.

And O God — when our own time comes, as it came for Sayyed al-Radhi at forty-seven and for Sayyed al-Murtadha at eighty, grant us husn al-khatima.

A good ending.

The ending of those whom You have chosen and who have chosen You.

Let us depart this world in the manner of these two brothers — with our work given to those who would carry it forward, and our hearts at peace with the One who created us.

And let us be reunited, by Your mercy, with the ones we have loved in this life and with the ones we have only loved from afar — in a Paradise where the soil of Karbala lies open beneath our feet and the face of the Imam, may our very souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return, is the first sight our eyes meet.

O God, send Your blessings upon Muhammad and the family of Muhammad — and hasten their relief — and may their enemies, all of them, be excluded from Your mercy.

Amen, O Lord, Sustainer of the Universes.

Amen, O Most Merciful of the Merciful.

Teaser for Next Week

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

Preamble

Tonight, we begin with a letter — but not the kind of letter any postal service could deliver.

We begin with a letter from a man the world cannot see, to a man the world would never forget.

In the early years of the Major Occultation — when no Deputy remained, when the door to the Imam had been closed, when the community might reasonably have wondered whether the Hidden Imam knew they existed at all — a letter arrived.

It arrived for a scholar in Baghdad.

And it began with these words:

سَلَامُ اللَّهِ عَلَيْكَ أَيُّهَا الْوَلِيُّ الْمُخْلِصُ فِي الدِّينِ، الْمَخْصُوصُ فِينَا بِالْيَقِينِ

“The peace of God be upon you, O friend — the one sincere in faith, the one distinguished among us by his certainty.”

— From the Tawqi’ of Imam al-Mahdi (aj) to Shaykh al-Mufid; recorded in Bihar al-Anwar, Volume 53

And in another letter:

سَلَامُ اللَّهِ عَلَيْكَ أَيُّهَا النَّاصِرُ لِلْحَقِّ، الدَّاعِي إِلَيْهِ بِكَلِمَةِ الصِّدْقِ

“The peace of God be upon you, O supporter of the Truth — the one who calls to it with the word of truthfulness.”

— From the Tawqi’ of Imam al-Mahdi (aj) to Shaykh al-Mufid; recorded in Bihar al-Anwar, Volume 53

Listen to what the Imam is saying.

He is not writing to a king.

He is not writing to a general.

He is writing to a scholar.

And the titles he gives him —

— are not titles any caliph or sultan could bestow.

These are titles conferred from the Unseen.

Tonight, we meet the man who received them.

A Note to the Congregation

Before we begin, a word about where we are going.

Over the past three sessions, we have been covering a great deal of ground each week — entire centuries, multiple scholars, vast historical arcs.

The material ahead of us is too rich and too important to continue at that pace.

Beginning tonight, we are going to slow down.

Not because there is less to say — but because there is more.

Each of the scholars we will meet in the coming weeks — the theologians, the founders, the martyrs, the mystics, the revolutionaries — deserves to be known not merely as a name in a list, but as a human being.

We want to walk with them.

To understand the world they were born into.

To see what they built.

To stand at their graveside and ask:

The Prophet, peace be upon him, his family and righteous companions, taught gradually — giving knowledge in portions the heart could absorb.

We will follow his example.

There is a wisdom the scholars of medicine have always known: when a person has been without food for a long time, you do not place a feast before them.

You give nourishment carefully, in measure, so the body can receive it.

Our community has been starved of this knowledge for a long time.

We will feed it — but with care.

So tonight: one man.

One life.

One chapter in the story we are telling.

And that man’s name is Shaykh al-Mufid.

Introduction

In our last session, we met the Preservers.

Shaykh al-Kulayni — the man from Kulayn who spent twenty years in Baghdad compiling Al-Kafi, and who died in the very year the door of the Minor Occultation closed.

Shaykh al-Saduq — the child born of the Imam’s own supplication, who travelled from Qum to Fergana and back to fight the crisis of doubt with the weapon of evidence.

Together, they gave us the first two of the Four Books.

They saved the raw material of the tradition — the words of the Imams, gathered, verified, and organised into works that have sustained the community for over a thousand years.

But here is the question that their achievement raised — a question they could not answer, because it was not their question to answer:

The hadith were compiled.

The texts were preserved.

The narrations were organised.

But the Shi’a did not live in a vacuum.

They lived in Baghdad — the most intellectually vibrant city on earth — surrounded by brilliant minds who did not share their beliefs and who demanded reasons, not merely reports.

The Mu’tazilites — the great rationalist theologians — shared the Shi’a commitment to divine justice, but rejected the Imamate.

They could argue circles around anyone who only knew hadith.

The Ash’arites — who would become the dominant theological school of Sunni Islam — affirmed divine predestination and challenged the Shi’a understanding of God’s justice and man’s free will.

And behind both stood the towering shadow of Greek philosophy — the legacy of Aristotle and Plato, which had entered the Islamic world through the great translation movement and had been powerfully reshaped by Muslim thinkers.

Al-Farabi — known as “the Second Teacher,” second only to Aristotle himself — had already laid the philosophical groundwork a generation earlier.

And Ibn Sina — Avicenna — who was born just fifteen years after Shaykh al-Mufid, would soon elevate Islamic philosophy to its highest peak.

We will encounter both of these giants again as our series continues, because the Shi’a scholars we are tracing did not build in isolation — they built in conversation with the most powerful ideas of their age, and they were not afraid of that conversation.

And behind all of these intellectual challenges stood a more immediate, more dangerous question:

If the Shi’a cannot defend their beliefs in the arena of reason — if they can only quote hadith while their opponents construct arguments — then how long before the educated youth of the community simply walk away?

The preservers had saved the voice of the Imams.

Now someone had to defend it.

Someone had to take the preserved tradition and arm it with reason — to prove that what the Imams taught was not merely transmitted truth, but demonstrable truth.

That someone was a young man from a small town on the Tigris, who arrived in Baghdad, walked into the classroom of the most formidable Mu’tazili judge in the city — and left that classroom with a new name.

They called him al-Mufid.

The Beneficial One.

Recap

In Session 63 — “When the Light Was Hidden” — we stood at the threshold of the Major Occultation.

We heard the final Tawqi’ of the Hidden Imam — the letter that closed the door and delegated authority to the scholars:

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.”

— Al-Saduq, Kamal al-Din wa Tamam al-Ni’mah, Volume 2, Chapter 45, Hadith 4; also recorded in Bihar al-Anwar, Volume 53

We traced the work of Shaykh al-Kulayni — twenty years compiling Al-Kafi in Baghdad, sixteen thousand narrations, completed in the very year the Occultation became total.

We followed Shaykh al-Saduq from Qum to Fergana and back — the scholar who found a community in doubt and answered that doubt with Kamal al-Din and Man la Yahduruhu al-Faqih.

We explored the golden window opened by the Buyid dynasty — the Daylamite mountain people who remembered the Alid refugees who had brought them Islam, and who, when they came to power, gave the Shi’a their first era of intellectual freedom.

We named the Four Books and the Six Books side by side — honouring the shared inheritance of preservation.

And we established the critical principle that defines the Shi’a approach to hadith: no book is wholly sahih — every narration must be tested, and the supreme standard against which it is tested is the Book of God.

That session ended with the foundations laid.

Tonight, we meet the man who built the walls.

Video of the Majlis (Sermon/Lecture)

Audio of the Majlis (Sermon/Lecture)

Point 1: The Formation — From Ukbara to Baghdad

The Boy from the Banks of the Tigris

He was born in the year 336 after the Hijrah — seven years after the Major Occultation had begun, seven years into the silence — in a town called Ukbara.

Ukbara was a small settlement on the eastern bank of the Tigris, about sixty kilometres north of Baghdad, in what is today the Saladin Governorate of Iraq — the same province that contains the city of Samarra, where the Tenth and Eleventh Imams were held under house arrest by the Abbasids, and where the Twelfth Imam entered his Occultation.

His full name was Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn al-Nu’man.

His kunya was Abu Abdillah.

A kunya is a traditional Arabic honorific — a name of parentage, literally meaning “father of” or “mother of,” used as a mark of respect and dignity.

In Arab and Islamic culture, to address someone by their kunya rather than their given name is a sign of honour.

Abu Abdillah — “Father of Abdillah” — was how his contemporaries would have addressed him in respect, much as we might say “sir” or use a formal title in English, though the kunya carries a warmer, more personal weight.

And the people of his time knew him first by a simpler title:

Ibn al-Mu’allim — “the Son of the Teacher” — because his father was a teacher, a man who understood that the greatest inheritance he could give his son was not land or gold, but knowledge.

And so his father did what the mother of Sayyed al-Murtada and Sayyed al-Radhi would do a generation later — a decision we will hear about in our next session.

He brought his son to Baghdad.

Not to seek wealth.

Not to enter the courts of power.

To study.

The City He Entered

And what a city to enter.

We described in our last session the golden window that the Buyid dynasty had opened for the Shi’a — the sons of Daylamite mountain fishermen who remembered the Alid refugees who had brought them Islam, and who, when they conquered Baghdad, gave the community something it had never had: freedom.

By the time the young Ibn al-Mu’allim arrived in Baghdad, that freedom was at its peak.

The Buyid grip on the city was secure, the patronage of learning was at its most generous, and the intellectual environment was unmatched anywhere in the world — though the dynasty’s internal rivalries were beginning to show the cracks that would, within decades, allow new conquerors to sweep it all away.

The al-Karkh quarter — the Shi’i neighbourhood — was the intellectual heart of the city.

Over a hundred bookshops lined its streets.

Scholars debated in courts, in mosques, in gardens, in the markets and even in the bathhouses.

The Buyid rulers patronised learning across sectarian lines — and the result was the most intellectually vibrant environment the Muslim world had ever seen.

But it was also a furnace.

Because intellectual freedom does not mean intellectual comfort.

It means that every idea must defend itself.

The Mu’tazilites — brilliant rationalist theologians who affirmed divine justice but rejected the Imamate — held major positions in the courts and academies.

Their arguments were sophisticated, their methods rigorous, their confidence immense.

The Ash’arites — the rising school of Sunni theology, championed by Abu al-Hasan al-Ash’ari and his followers — were developing their own systematic defence of Sunni doctrine.

This was the city the boy from Ukbara walked into.

A city where you could publish freely — but where you would be challenged immediately.

A city where being Shi’a was no longer punishable by death — but where being Shi’a without rational arguments meant being dismissed as intellectually provincial.

A city that demanded not merely faith, but the defence of faith.

The Day He Earned His Name

He studied under the leading Shi’i scholars of Baghdad and Qum — jurists and hadith specialists who carried the tradition of the Imams.

And here is a detail worth noting: one of his principal teachers — a hadith scholar and jurist from Qum by the name of Ibn Qulawayh al-Qummi — was a direct student of Shaykh al-Kulayni, the very compiler we met in our last session.

The chain is not abstract.

Shaykh al-Kulayni compiled the words of the Imams.

His student transmitted them.

And that student’s student — Shaykh al-Mufid — would defend them with the weapons of reason.

Three generations, three links, one unbroken chain.

But Shaykh al-Mufid did not study only under Shi’i scholars.

He also attended the classes of prominent Mu’tazili thinkers — because this was a tradition that did not fear other ideas.

It engaged them.

And it was in one of these classes that the moment came.

The young Ibn al-Mu’allim was sitting in the circle of one of the most formidable Mu’tazili scholars of the age — the judge Abdul Jabbar, whose intellect commanded the respect of the entire city.

During the lesson, the young student raised a point.

The sources tell us that it was so sharp, so precisely argued, so unexpected from someone so young, that the judge was stunned.

He asked the student’s name.

And then — in front of the entire class — he invited the young man to come and sit in his own place, the place of the teacher, and said:

“You are truly mufid — truly beneficial.”

أَنْتَ مُفِيدٌ حَقًّا

The scholars and students in the class were astonished.

The judge turned to them and said:

— The account of how Shaykh al-Mufid earned his title, recorded in the biographical literature; see Sayyid Bahr al-’Ulum, Rijal; also cited in Ali Naghi Zabihzadeh, “Shi’ite Authorities in the Age of Major Occultation, Part 1: Shaykh al-Mufid,” published by the Ahlul Bayt World Assembly

From that day, the boy from Ukbara was no longer Ibn al-Mu’allim — the Son of the Teacher.

He was al-Mufid — the Beneficial One.

And the name was not merely a compliment.

It was a prophecy.

Because this young man would spend the rest of his life being exactly that — beneficial — to the community of the Ahl al-Bayt.

The Word Spread

News of what had happened in that classroom reached the Buyid court.

The ruler — ’Adud al-Dawla, the most powerful of the Buyid monarchs, the man who had built the first shrine over the grave of Imam Ali in Najaf — recognised what the community had in this young scholar.

He honoured Shaykh al-Mufid with gifts: a horse with a golden saddle, a gown, a turban, a hundred golden dinars — each dinar worth ten ordinary gold coins.

And he ordered that the students who attended Shaykh al-Mufid’s classes be provided with bread and meat every day — so that poverty would never be a barrier to learning.

This was not mere royal patronage.

It was the Buyid state saying to the Shi’a community:

And Shaykh al-Mufid, for his part, used that investment not to build personal wealth or political influence — but to build a school.

A school that would produce the next generation of scholars — including two brothers whose story we will tell next week, and whose teacher was chosen for them in a dream by none other than Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, peace be upon her.

But that is for next week.

What Formed Him

Let us pause here — because Point 1 is about formation, and the formation of Shaykh al-Mufid carries lessons that are as alive today as they were a thousand years ago.

First: his father.

A man whose name history barely records — “al-Mu’allim,” the Teacher — but whose single decision changed the course of Shi’i intellectual history.

He brought his son to Baghdad.

He chose education over comfort, over safety, over the familiar.

He did not keep his son in Ukbara, where life was quieter and the questions were smaller.

How many parents today face the same choice?

Whether to send a child to the Hawza, to a place of serious study, to an environment where they will be challenged and stretched — or to keep them close, where the questions are manageable and the answers are easy?

The father of Shaykh al-Mufid chose the furnace.

And the furnace made a diamond.

Second: he studied under scholars who disagreed with him.

The young Shaykh al-Mufid sat in the circles of Mu’tazili thinkers — men who rejected the Imamate, men whose theology differed from his on fundamental points.

He did not avoid them.

He did not declare them enemies.

He learned their arguments so thoroughly that when the moment came, he could defeat those arguments from the inside.

This is a lesson our community desperately needs today.

We live in an age where many believers are afraid of ideas they disagree with — afraid that exposure to philosophy, or to Western thought, or to the arguments of other Islamic schools, will somehow weaken their faith.

Shaykh al-Mufid’s example says the opposite.

He sat in the Mu’tazili classroom.

He listened.

He understood.

And then — when the moment came — he stood up and made a point so sharp that the teacher himself could not answer it.

You cannot defeat an argument you have not understood.

You cannot defend a faith you have only inherited but never examined.

The Buyid golden window gave the Shi’a freedom.

Shaykh al-Mufid used that freedom not to build walls, but to enter the arena.

And here is the contemporary reflection that presses on us: the Buyid window of intellectual freedom parallels the window Muslim communities have in the West today — freedom to teach, to publish, to debate, to build institutions.

The question Shaykh al-Mufid’s era poses to us is: are we using our window the way Shaykh al-Mufid used his?

Two hundred books in a lifetime, without a printing press.

We have the internet.

What are we writing?

Third: the window.

We have said this before, and we will say it again, because the pattern repeats: every generation has a window.

The Sadiqiyya window.

The Buyid window.

And the window we are in now.

The window does not announce when it will close.

It simply closes.

And then the only question that matters is:

Point 2: The Contribution — The Shield of Reason and the Letters from the Unseen

The Intellectual Revolution

To understand what Shaykh al-Mufid did, you must first understand what existed before him.

For the first century and a half after the Occultation, the Shi’a scholarly tradition was primarily a tradition of riwayah — narration.

The scholars preserved what the Imams had said, transmitted it faithfully, and organised it into collections.

This was the work of Shaykh al-Kulayni and Shaykh al-Saduq — the Preservers we met last week.

And it was essential work.

Without it, the words of the Imams would have been lost.

But narration alone has a vulnerability.

If your entire defence of your beliefs consists of saying,

then anyone who does not already accept the authority of the Imam will simply shrug and walk away.

And in Buyid Baghdad, shrugging was the least of it.

The Mu’tazilites did not merely shrug — they argued.

They constructed elaborate rational proofs for their theological positions.

They could demonstrate, through formal logic, why they believed what they believed about God’s justice, about human free will, about the nature of the Qur’an.

The Ash’arites argued back — with their own formal systems, their own theological architecture, their own answers to the same questions.

And the Shi’a?

The Shi’a had hadith.

Magnificent hadith.

Profound hadith.

Hadith that contained, within them, the deepest truths of existence.

But hadith that had not yet been translated into the language of rational argument.

Shaykh al-Mufid understood that this was not merely an academic gap.

It was an existential threat.

If the educated youth of Baghdad — the young men and women who read philosophy, who attended the Mu’tazili debates, who breathed the air of rational inquiry — could not find rational arguments for their Shi’a beliefs, they would leave.

Not because the beliefs were false, but because no one had shown them why the beliefs were true — in the language they understood.

And so Shaykh al-Mufid did something that changed the trajectory of Shi’ism forever.

He took the preserved tradition — the hadith of the Imams, the theology of the Ahl al-Bayt — and he built around it a fortress of rational argument.

He did not abandon the hadith.

He armed them.

He developed what the scholars call Kalam — systematic rational theology — as a Shi’i discipline.

Before him, Kalam was largely a Mu’tazili and Ash’ari enterprise.

After him, the Shi’a had their own theological system — one that could stand in any debate, in any court, in any age, and defend itself.

And alongside the Kalam, he developed the Shi’i approach to Usul al-Fiqh — the principles of jurisprudence — the formal methodology by which scholars derive legal rulings from the foundational sources.

Before Shaykh al-Mufid, Shi’i jurists relied almost entirely on direct hadith application.

Shaykh al-Mufid introduced a structured method — a logical framework for moving from the general to the specific, from the principle to the ruling, from the text to the application.

He did not see a contradiction between reason and revelation.

He saw them as two wings of the same bird.

And the bird could not fly with only one.

His written output was staggering.

The biographical sources record that he wrote approximately two hundred works across theology, jurisprudence, history, ethics, and Qur’anic sciences.

Among the most significant:

Awa’il al-Maqalat (The First Principles of Discourses)— a theological work setting out the distinctive positions of the Shi’a school, clarifying where the Shi’a agree with other Islamic schools and where they differ, and why they differ.

Al-Irshad (The Guidance) — a comprehensive history of the Twelve Imams, their lives, their miracles, and their stations — a work that remains a primary reference to this day.

Al-Muqni’ah (The Sufficient Guide) — his most important jurisprudential work, a manual of Shi’i law that begins — and this is characteristic of the man — not with legal rulings, but with matters of belief.

Because for Shaykh al-Mufid, law without theology was a body without a soul.

Two hundred works.

In an age without printing presses, without computers, without even reliable supplies of paper — where every copy had to be written by hand, and every book was a physical act of endurance as much as an intellectual one.

This was not a man who theorised about defending the faith.

He did it — one book at a time, one debate at a time, one student at a time.

And his students would include the greatest scholars of the next generation — as we will see in a moment.

The Letters from the Unseen

What we have described so far — the intellectual revolution, the two hundred books, the transformation of Shi’i theology — would be enough to secure Shaykh al-Mufid’s place in history.

But there is something else.

Something that lifts his story from the realm of intellectual biography into the realm of the sacred.

During the Major Occultation — when no Special Deputy existed, when the door to the Imam had been closed by the final Tawqi’ we heard in our last session — Shaykh al-Mufid received letters from the Hidden Imam.

We must pause here, because the weight of this statement deserves to be felt.

The final Tawqi’ of the Imam — delivered through the Fourth Deputy in 329 AH — had explicitly warned:

فَقَدْ وَقَعَتِ الْغَيْبَةُ التَّامَّةُ، فَلَا ظُهُورَ إِلَّا بِإِذْنِ اللَّهِ تَعَالَى ذِكْرُهُ، وَذَلِكَ بَعْدَ طُولِ الْأَمَدِ، وَقَسْوَةِ الْقُلُوبِ، وَامْتِلَاءِ الْأَرْضِ جَوْرًا. وَسَيَأْتِي لِشِيعَتِي مَنْ يَدَّعِي الْمُشَاهَدَةَ، أَلَا فَمَنِ ادَّعَى الْمُشَاهَدَةَ قَبْلَ خُرُوجِ السُّفْيَانِيِّ وَالصَّيْحَةِ فَهُوَ كَذَّابٌ مُفْتَرٍ، وَلَا حَوْلَ وَلَا قُوَّةَ إِلَّا بِاللَّهِ الْعَلِيِّ الْعَظِيمِ

“The complete Occultation has now occurred. There shall be no appearance except by the permission of God, exalted be His mention, and that shall be after a lengthy period, and the hardening of hearts, and the earth being filled with injustice. And there shall come to my Shi’a those who claim to have seen me. Behold — whoever claims to have seen me before the rising of the Sufyani and the heavenly Cry, he is a liar and a fabricator. And there is no power and no strength except through God, the Most High, the Most Great.”

— From the final Tawqi’ (letter) of Imam al-Mahdi (aj) to his Fourth Deputy, Ali ibn Muhammad al-Samarri, in the year 329 AH. Recorded in: Al-Tusi, Kitab al-Ghayba (The Book of Occultation), Hadith 365; Al-Saduq, Kamal al-Din wa Tamam al-Ni’mah; Al-Tabrisi, Al-Ihtijaj

The door of special deputyship was closed.

No one could claim to be a representative in the way the Four Deputies had been.

And yet — letters came to Shaykh al-Mufid.

Not through a formal deputyship.

Not through a public claim of representation.

Through means that the sources describe without fully explaining — because the Imam’s affairs in the Occultation are, by their nature, beyond our full comprehension.

What the tradition records is the content of these letters.

And the content is extraordinary.

We heard two of them in tonight’s preamble:

سَلَامُ اللَّهِ عَلَيْكَ أَيُّهَا الْوَلِيُّ الْمُخْلِصُ فِي الدِّينِ، الْمَخْصُوصُ فِينَا بِالْيَقِينِ

“The peace of God be upon you, O friend — the one sincere in faith, the one distinguished among us by his certainty.”

— From the Tawqi’ of Imam al-Mahdi (aj) to Shaykh al-Mufid; recorded in Bihar al-Anwar, Volume 53

And:

سَلَامُ اللَّهِ عَلَيْكَ أَيُّهَا النَّاصِرُ لِلْحَقِّ، الدَّاعِي إِلَيْهِ بِكَلِمَةِ الصِّدْقِ

“The peace of God be upon you, O supporter of the Truth — the one who calls to it with the word of truthfulness.”

— From the Tawqi’ of Imam al-Mahdi (aj) to Shaykh al-Mufid; recorded in Bihar al-Anwar, Volume 53

Some scholars of the tradition have recorded that over the course of Shaykh al-Mufid’s thirty years of scholarly leadership, he may have received as many as thirty such communications.

The Imam addressed him as “dear committed brother” — a phrase that tells you everything about the relationship between the Hidden Imam and the scholars who carry his authority.

But it is not the words of praise that are most significant.

It is the correction.

The Correction — When the Imam Intervened

There is an account — recorded in the biographical sources — that illustrates the nature of this relationship more powerfully than any theological argument could.

A man came to Shaykh al-Mufid from a nearby village with a question.

A woman in their community had died during childbirth.

What should be done?

Shaykh al-Mufid issued his ruling — bury the mother with her child.

The man thanked him and left.

But on his way back to the village, something happened.

A man he did not know called out to him on the road and said:

The villager, believing the message had come from Shaykh al-Mufid, followed the instruction.

The child was alive.

The child was saved.

Years later, the man and the child — now grown — returned to Baghdad to thank Shaykh al-Mufid for sending the corrected message that had saved the child’s life.

And Shaykh al-Mufid realised: he had never sent any message.

He had never sent any messenger.

He did not know who the man on the road was.

The messenger had come from the Imam.

The realisation struck him like a blow.

He — the greatest scholar of his age, the man who had written two hundred books — had issued a ruling that was wrong.

And the Imam himself had intervened to correct it.

Shaykh al-Mufid went home.

He closed his door.

And he seriously considered never issuing a fatwa again.

Think about what this means.

A scholar of his stature — a man whose entire life was dedicated to providing guidance — was so shaken by a single error that he was prepared to stop entirely.

This is not the behaviour of a man motivated by ego or status.

This is the behaviour of a man who understood the gravity of what it means to speak on behalf of the religion of God.

And then — another communication came from the Imam:

— The account of the Imam’s correction and subsequent instruction to Shaykh al-Mufid; recorded in the biographical literature; see also Ali Naghi Zabihzadeh, “Shi’ite Authorities in the Age of Major Occultation, Part 1: Shaykh al-Mufid,” published by the Ahlul Bayt World Assembly

The Imam corrected him — and then told him to carry on.

This is the relationship between the Hidden Imam and the Marja’iyyah.

The scholars are not infallible.

The Imam never said they were.

He said they are his proof — his representatives.

And he watches over them.

He corrects when correction is needed.

And he encourages when encouragement is needed.

The Marja’iyyah is not a human invention.

It is not an accident of history.

It is a divinely supervised institution — guided from the Unseen by the Imam whose authority it carries.

And the tawqi’at to Shaykh al-Mufid are the proof.

The Dream of Sayyedah Fatimah

There is one more account from the life of Shaykh al-Mufid that we must hear tonight — because it connects this session to our next.

The sources record that Shaykh al-Mufid saw, in a dream, the Lady of Light — Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, peace be upon her.

She came to him holding the hands of two young boys — Imam al-Hasan and Imam al-Husayn, peace be upon them — and she said:

يَا شَيْخُ، عَلِّمْهُمَا الْفِقْهَ

“O Shaykh — teach them jurisprudence.”

— The account of Shaykh al-Mufid’s dream of Sayyedah Fatimah (s); recorded in the biographical sources; see also Zabihzadeh, “Shi’ite Authorities: Shaykh al-Mufid”

Shaykh al-Mufid awoke, shaken by what he had seen.

That morning, he went to the mosque in the al-Karkh quarter of Baghdad — the Shi’i neighbourhood we have described.

And there, waiting for him, was a woman — accompanied by her servants — holding the hands of her two young sons.

She said:

The two boys were Sayyed al-Murtada and Sayyed al-Radhi — Ali and Muhammad, sons of al-Husayn, descendants of Imam al-Kadhim, peace be upon him.

The dream was actualised.

The mother had brought her sons to Shaykh al-Mufid — and Sayyedah Fatimah had already instructed him to receive them.

These two brothers would become giants.

Sayyed al-Radhi would compile Nahj al-Balagha — the sermons, letters, and sayings of Imam Ali, peace be upon him — one of the most influential texts in the Arabic language.

Sayyed al-Murtada would become the undisputed leader of the Shi’a for twenty-three years after Shaykh al-Mufid’s death.

That is the subject of our next session, God willing.

But the lesson tonight is this: the teacher-student relationship, in the Hawza, is not a bureaucratic arrangement.

It is not a matter of applications and admissions and enrolment forms.

It is sacred.

Sayyedah Fatimah herself — the daughter of the Prophet, the mother of the Imams — appeared in a dream to designate who should teach, and who should be taught.

The Hawza is not merely an educational institution.

It is an institution whose appointments are sometimes made in the Unseen.

The Expansion of the Jurist’s Authority — A Step Toward Wilayat al-Faqih

There is one more dimension of Shaykh al-Mufid’s contribution that we must name — because it connects directly to the thread that runs through this entire series.

In his jurisprudential work — his most important legal text — Shaykh al-Mufid did something that went beyond his predecessors.

He argued that the Imams themselves had delegated specific executive responsibilities to the qualified Shi’i jurists — the fuqaha.

The jurists, he wrote, have been granted authority by the Imams to lead prayers — not only the daily prayers, but the congregational Friday prayers and the prayers of the two Eids.

They have been granted authority to judge in disputes and reconcile parties.

They have been granted authority to collect and distribute the religious dues — the khums and the zakat — and to ensure that these reach those who deserve them.

In other words: the jurist is not merely a man who answers questions.

The jurist is a man who governs — who administers the affairs of the community in the absence of the Imam.

The biographical sources record his position clearly. In his own words, Mufid stated that the Imams:

قَدْ فَوَّضُوا ذَلِكَ إِلَى فُقَهَاءِ شِيعَتِهِمْ

“…have delegated these matters to the jurists of their Shi’a.”

— Shaykh al-Mufid, Al-Muqni’ah; cited in Zabihzadeh, “Shi’ite Authorities: Shaykh al-Mufid”; see also Ahmad Azari Qummi, Wilayat al-Faqih az Didgah-e Fuqaha-ye Islam, pp. 167–184

Do you hear what is happening in this statement?

The preservers — Shaykh al-Kulayni and Shaykh al-Saduq — compiled the hadith.

Shaykh al-Mufid then said:

They require interpretation.

And the men who interpret them — the qualified jurists — are not merely scholars.

They are delegated authorities.

They carry a portion of the Imam’s responsibility.

This is a direct step on the road to the Marja’iyyah — the system of scholarly authority that would develop over the coming centuries.

And it is a direct step on the road to Wilayat al-Faqih — the principle that the most qualified jurist can govern not merely individuals, but a state.

Shaheed al-Awwal — the First Martyr, whom we will meet in a future session — would take this principle further, expanding the jurist’s executive role even more explicitly.

And Imam Khomeini — may God rest his soul — would take it to its logical conclusion.

But the seed was planted here.

By a man from Ukbara.

Who sat in a Mu’tazili classroom, earned a name, received letters from the Unseen, and wrote two hundred books to prove that the faith of the Ahl al-Bayt could hold its own in any arena.

Point 3: The Departure & Legacy — The Funeral of Eighty Thousand

His Piety — Because Knowledge Without Character Is Noise

Before we speak of how Shaykh al-Mufid left this world, we must speak of how he lived in it.

Because this series is not merely about what these scholars wrote.

It is about what they were.

And the sources are unanimous: Shaykh al-Mufid was not only the most formidable intellect of his generation — he was among its most devoted worshippers.

The scholars who knew him personally described a man who prayed through the night — every night.

Who fasted frequently.

Who wore rough, simple clothing despite having access to the patronage of the most powerful dynasty in the Muslim world.

Who gave constantly in charity — not from surplus, but from substance.

The Shafi’i historian Yafi’i — a man who disagreed with Mufid on virtually every theological point — wrote of him:

كان كثير الصدقات، عظيم الخشوع، كثير الصلاة والصوم، خشن اللباس

“He would give charity very often, and prayed a lot, and practised fasting frequently. He was a man of modesty and midnight prayer. He wore rough and coarse clothes.”

— Yafi’i; cited in Zabihzadeh, “Shi’ite Authorities: Shaykh al-Mufid”

And another great Sunni scholar — Ibn Hajar al-’Asqalani, one of the most respected hadith authorities in the entire Sunni tradition — went further:

وكان كثير التقشف والتخشع، والإكباب على العلم... وما كان ينام من الليل إلا هجعة، ثم يقوم يصلي أو يدرس أو يتلو القرآن

“He was a true worshipper and ascetic. He was a man of midnight prayer. He was steadfast in acquiring knowledge. Shortly after the beginning of the night, he would wake up and begin prayer, then he would study and read the Qur’an.”

— Ibn Hajar al-’Asqalani; cited in Zabihzadeh, “Shi’ite Authorities: Shaykh al-Mufid”

The same sources record that eighty thousand people embraced Shi’ism because of him — not through compulsion, not through political pressure, but through the force of his arguments and the witness of his character.

Let that number settle.

Eighty thousand people changed their beliefs — not because a king ordered them to, but because a man in rough clothes prayed all night, argued all day, gave away everything he had, and made more sense than anyone else in the room.

This is the model of the Hawza at its best.

Not scholars who impress from a distance.

Scholars whose proximity opens hearts.

Because when you see a man who has mastered philosophy, who can defeat any opponent in debate, who has written two hundred books — and then you discover that this same man sleeps on a rough mat, gives his money to the poor, and stands before God weeping in the last third of the night — something happens to you.

The argument enters through the mind.

But the character enters through the heart.

And when both arrive together, the effect is permanent.

This is the lesson that the Hawza has always understood — and that our modern age, with its obsession with credentials and publications and online followings, is in danger of forgetting:

Knowledge without piety is a lamp without oil.

It may look like a lamp.

It may sit where a lamp should sit.

But it gives no light.

Shaykh al-Mufid gave light — because the oil of his worship fed the flame of his knowledge.

The Third of Ramadan, 413 AH

Shaykh al-Mufid died on the third of the holy month of Ramadan, in the year 413 after the Hijrah — 1022 CE in the Gregorian calendar.

He had lived for seventy-seven years.

Seventy-seven years of teaching, debating, writing, worshipping, and building.

And Baghdad mourned him as it had mourned few men before.

The great Sunni historian Ibn Kathir — a scholar of the Hanbali school, who was no friend to Shi’ism in his theological positions — counted the death of Shaykh al-Mufid among the most significant events of the year 413 AH.

In Ibn Kathir’s own words:

توفي في هذه السنة... شيخ الإمامية الروافض، والمصنف لهم، والمحامي عن حوزتهم. كانت له وجاهة عند ملوك الأطراف لميل كثير من أهل ذلك الزمان إلى التشيع... وكان من جملة تلاميذه الشريف الرضي والمرتضى، وقد رثاه بقصيدة بعد وفاته في هذه السنة

“The great shaykh and Shi’ite scholar passed away in that year. He was one of the major Shi’ite authors and supporters of their seminaries. He had credit and influence among the kings of neighbouring regions. Sharif Radi and Murtada were his students. They composed some couplets in his grief after he passed away.”

— Ibn Kathir; cited in Zabihzadeh, “Shi’ite Authorities: Shaykh al-Mufid”

This was not a Shi’i hagiographer exaggerating.

This was a Sunni historian acknowledging that a giant had fallen.

And the funeral itself was something the city had rarely seen.

The sources record that eighty thousand people attended.

Eighty thousand mourners — in a city that, at the time, had a population of perhaps several hundred thousand.

A significant portion of the entire capital came to a stop.

Among the mourners was Sayyed al-Murtada — Shaykh al-Mufid’s greatest student, the man who had been brought to him as a boy by his mother, the man Sayyedah Fatimah had designated in a dream.

Sayyed al-Murtada led the funeral prayer.

And he and his brother Sayyed al-Radhi composed verses of grief for the teacher who had shaped them both.

Think about what eighty thousand mourners means.

These were not people who had read his books — most of them could not read.

These were not fellow scholars who appreciated his methodology.

These were ordinary people.

Shopkeepers and labourers, mothers and children, the people of al-Karkh and beyond — who understood, in the way that ordinary people always understand, that this man had given his life for them.

He had defended their beliefs when no one else could.

He had given them intellectual dignity in a city that could easily have dismissed them.

He had stood in the courts and the classrooms and the public squares and said: the faith of the Ahl al-Bayt is not a provincial superstition.

It is a rational, defensible, demonstrable truth.

And I will prove it — to anyone, anywhere, in any language you choose.

They came to his funeral because he had given them their voice.

The Imam’s Farewell

And then there is this.

After Shaykh al-Mufid was buried, verses appeared — attributed by the tradition to the Hidden Imam himself — that were inscribed upon his grave:

لَا صَوَّتَ النَّاعِي بِفَقْدِكَ إِنَّهُ
يَوْمُ عَلَى آلِ الرَّسُولِ عَظِيمُ

“Let no voice be raised announcing your death —
for the day of your passing is immense upon the Household of the Prophet.”

إِنْ كُنْتَ قَدْ غُيِّبْتَ فِي جَدَثِ الثَّرَى
فَالْعِلْمُ وَالتَّوْحِيدُ فِيكَ مُقِيمُ

“Though you are concealed beneath the soil —
knowledge and the affirmation of God’s oneness reside forever in you.”

وَالْقَائِمُ الْمَهْدِيُّ يَفْرَحُ كُلَّمَا
تُلِيَتْ عَلَيْهِ دُرُوسُكَ التَّعْلِيمُ

“And the Arising Mahdi rejoices whenever
your teachings are recited before him.”

— Verses attributed to Imam al-Mahdi (aj), inscribed on the grave of Shaykh al-Mufid; recorded in the biographical sources; see also Zabihzadeh, “Shi’ite Authorities: Shaykh al-Mufid”

Read that last line again.

The Imam — hidden from the world, watching from the Unseen — rejoices when the work of this scholar is studied.

This is not merely a tribute to one man.

This is a statement about the entire scholarly tradition.

The Imam is not indifferent to the Hawza.

He is not distant from it.

He rejoices in it.

The work of every scholar who teaches, who writes, who preserves, who defends — that work reaches the Imam.

And it brings him joy.

If that does not give you goosebumps, check your pulse.

What He Left Behind — The Chain Unbroken

Let us now stand back and see where Shaykh al-Mufid stands on the road we are tracing.

Before Shaykh al-Mufid, the tradition had its content — the hadith of the Imams, compiled by Shaykh al-Kulayni and Shaykh al-Saduq.

Shaykh al-Mufid gave the tradition its method — rational theology, systematic jurisprudence, the formal defence of beliefs in the language of reason.

And he gave the tradition its students.

This is perhaps his greatest legacy — not the two hundred books, not the debates, not even the tawqi’at — but the fact that when he died, the chain did not break.

Sayyed al-Murtada — ’Alam al-Huda, “the Banner of Guidance” — took leadership of the Shi’a community for twenty-three years after Shaykh al—Mufid’s death.

He pushed the rational methodology further, insisted on critical evaluation of hadith against the Qur’an, and led the community through the final decades of the Buyid era.

Sayyed al-Radhi — Sayyed al-Murtada’s brother — compiled Nahj al-Balagha, one of the most influential texts in the Arabic language.

He gave the community the political manual of Imam Ali, peace be upon him — a text that would feed directly into the concept of just governance that leads, centuries later, to Wilayat al-Faqih.

And through Sayyed al-Murtada’s students — above all Shaykh al-Tusi, whom we will meet in two sessions, God willing — Shaykh al-Mufid’s methodology would travel from Baghdad to Najaf, where it would be institutionalised in the Hawza that stands to this day.

The chain runs like this:

The Imams taught their companions.

The companions recorded their words in the Usul — the Four Hundred Principles.

Shaykh al-Kulayni and Shaykh al-Saduq compiled those words into the Four Books.

Shaykh al-Mufid armed those books with reason and trained the next generation to wield them.

Sayyed al-Murtada and Sayyed al-Radhi refined the method and preserved the political philosophy.

Shaykh al-Tusi would take it all to Najaf and build the permanent institution.

Every link holds because the previous link held.

Shaykh al-Mufid is the link between preservation and defence — between the raw material and the rational fortress built around it.

Without him, the tradition would have had its texts but not its arguments.

It would have had its content but not its method.

It would have had its past but not its future.

Lessons from the Departure

Three things we carry from the ending of Shaykh al-Mufid’s life.

First: character outlasts argument.

Shaykh al-Mufid won every debate.

He wrote two hundred books.

He transformed Shi’i theology.

But when eighty thousand people came to his funeral, they were not mourning a debater.

They were mourning a man who prayed all night and gave away everything he had.

The arguments opened the door — the character walked through it.

In our age of social media scholars and online personalities, where intellectual performance is rewarded with followers and likes, Shaykh al-Mufid’s example is a corrective.

The question is not how many people watched your lecture.

The question is: did you pray last night?

Did you give from your own plate?

Would the people who live closest to you — your family, your neighbours, your students — testify that you are a servant of God, not a performer for an audience?

Second: the chain must not break.

Shaykh al-Mufid’s most important act was not any single book or any single debate.

It was the training of Sayyed al-Murtada and Sayyed al-Radhi — the two brothers who would carry the tradition forward.

Without them, everything Shaykh al-Mufid built would have died with him.

In our communities today — in Rochdale, in London, in Dearborn, in Sydney — we have speakers, we have programmes, we have institutions.

But the question is: are we training the next generation to carry this forward?

Or are we building around personalities who, when they leave, take everything with them?

The Hawza model is not personality-dependent. It is chain-dependent.

The teacher trains the student.

The student becomes the teacher.

The chain continues.

And the chain is stronger than any individual link.

Third: the Imam is watching.

The verses on Shaykh al-Mufid’s grave —

— tell us something that should transform how we understand our own work.

Every class taught in a mosque basement.

Every late-night study circle.

Every parent who sits with their child and teaches them about the Ahl al-Bayt.

Every scholar who writes a book that three people read.

Every volunteer who organises a programme that no one thanks them for.

The Imam sees it.

And it brings him joy.

You may not receive a tawqi’.

You may never hear his voice or read his words addressed to you by name.

But the relationship is real.

He is not neglectful of your affairs.

He is not forgetful of your remembrance.

He rejoices in your work — as he rejoiced in the work of the man from Ukbara who earned the name al-Mufid, and who spent seventy-seven years proving that the name was deserved.

Conclusion

Tonight, we have walked with one man — from Ukbara to Baghdad, from a student’s bench to the most formidable intellectual pulpit in the Muslim world, and from there to a grave inscribed with the words of the Hidden Imam.

Shaykh al-Mufid — Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn al-Nu’man — was the man who took the preserved tradition of the Imams and armed it with reason.

He transformed Shi’i theology from a tradition of narration into a tradition of rational defence.

He wrote two hundred books.

He debated every school and defeated every challenger.

He received letters from the Imam of the Age — who called him friend, who corrected him when he erred, and who told him to continue.

He saw Sayyedah Fatimah in a dream — and the next morning, the two boys she had entrusted to him walked through his door.

He expanded the authority of the jurist — planting the seed that would grow, over centuries, into the Marja’iyyah and ultimately into Wilayat al-Faqih.

And when he died, eighty thousand people came.

Not for his arguments.

For his character.

Because he was a man who prayed through the night, gave away his wealth, wore rough clothes, and never once confused knowledge with arrogance.

He was al-Mufid.

The Beneficial One.

And a thousand years later, we are still being benefited by him.

Remembrance: On the Martyrdom of Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq, Peace Be Upon Him

And before we close, we must pause — because God’s calendar does not work by accident.

Yesterday marked the anniversary of the martyrdom of the man from whom all of this flows.

Imam Ja’far ibn Muhammad al-Sadiq — peace be upon him — the sixth Imam, the teacher of four thousand, the founder of the school that gave the Shi’a and the Sunni world alike the foundations of their jurisprudence.

We spent an entire session with him — Session 62 — standing in his classroom in Medina, watching the greatest scholarly circle in the history of Islam pour out knowledge across every discipline.

And we said then:

Tonight, we have met one of those who preserved it — Shaykh al-Mufid, who armed the Imam’s teachings with the weapons of reason.

But the teacher himself — what happened to the teacher?

The Abbasid Caliph al-Mansur — the same al-Mansur who called Imam al-Sadiq

— could not remove the thorn by debate, by exile, or by imprisonment.

So he removed it with poison.

In the year 148 after the Hijrah, in the holy city of Medina, Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq was poisoned on the orders of al-Mansur.

The sources describe the poison being administered through grapes — offered as a gift, received as a betrayal.

The Imam suffered.

And then the Imam died.

He was buried in the cemetery of al-Baqi’ — next to his father, Imam al-Baqir, and his grandfather, Imam Zayn al-Abidin, and the Imam al-Hasan ibn Ali, peace be upon them all.

That grave — those graves — would later be demolished.

The Wahhabi destruction of al-Baqi’ in 1925 erased the physical markers.

As if the enemies knew that even a grave bearing the name of Imam al-Sadiq would become a university.

But they could not demolish what he built in the hearts of his students.

They could not demolish the four thousand.

They could not demolish the Usul — the Four Hundred Principles his companions carried away.

They could not demolish Al-Kafi, which Shaykh al-Kulayni compiled from those principles.

They could not demolish the fortress of reason that Shaykh al-Mufid built around them.

They poisoned the teacher.

But the lesson survived.

And tonight — a thousand years later, in a gathering that would not exist without him — we are the proof that the poison failed.

The thorn is still in their side.

And it will remain there — until his grandson, the Mahdi, appears to finish what he started.

Peace be upon you, O Abu Abdillah.

Peace be upon you, O son of the Messenger of God.

Peace be upon you, O teacher of four thousand and father of a civilisation.

Your students are still studying.

Your school is still open.

And the man from Ukbara — the one they called al-Mufid — defended your legacy with every breath he had.

May God gather them together — the teacher and the defender — in the company of your grandson, on the day the world is finally set right.

Supplication-Eulogy: A Prayer at the Grave of the Friend

O God — we stand tonight at the grave of a man who gave his life to defend the truth of Your Ahl al-Bayt.
A man who wore rough clothes and prayed through the night and wrote two hundred books so that a community would not lose its voice.
A man to whom Your Hidden Proof wrote with his own hand:
“O friend — O supporter of the Truth.”

We ask You by the station of that friendship — raise the rank of Shaykh al-Mufid.
Place him in the company of the Imams whose words he defended.
Let the light of his scholarship be a witness for him on the Day when all witnesses are called.
And let the Arising Mahdi — who rejoiced in his teachings — greet him as he greeted him in this world: as a brother, as a beloved, as a friend.

O God — the world tonight is drowning in oppression.

The lands of the Prophets are soaked in blood.
The cries of the innocent rise from every corner of this earth — from Palestine, from Lebanon, from Yemen, from Sudan, from every place where the powerful crush the weak and call it order.

And in this darkness, we understand — as Shaykh al-Mufid understood — that the weapon against oppression is not only the sword.
It is the pen.
It is the classroom.
It is the book written at midnight by a scholar who refuses to let ignorance win.

Because ignorance is the soil in which oppression grows.

And knowledge — true knowledge, rooted in Your Book and the teachings of Your Ahl al-Bayt — is the hand that uproots it.

Every child who is taught the truth is a blow against tyranny.
Every community that is educated is a fortress that cannot be taken.
Every scholar who speaks when silence is easier is a soldier in the army of the Imam — whether the Imam has appeared or not.

O God — hasten the return of our Master, the Imam of our Time, the son of al-Hasan, Your Proof upon Your creation and Your trustee over Your servants.

The earth is filled with injustice, as You promised it would be.

We cannot end that injustice alone.

But we can build — as Shaykh al-Mufid built.
We can teach — as Shaykh al-Mufid taught.
We can arm the next generation with reason and faith and courage — so that when the Imam appears, he finds not a community asleep, but a community that has been preparing, building, striving, and refusing to surrender to the darkness.

O God — make us links in the chain that Shaykh al-Mufid strengthened.
Make our work a source of the Imam’s joy.
And when the day comes that the Mahdi rises — let him find that the seeds Shaykh al-Mufid planted, and the seeds we planted after him, have become a garden worthy of his return.

O God — grant us an ending that is pleasing to You. Let us live in this world as Your true servants — following the path walked by the likes of Shaykh al-Mufid — and let us leave this world with that servanthood intact. And make us, in our living and in our dying, from those who are a source of joy for You, and for Muhammad, and for the family of Muhammad.

O God — bless Muhammad and the family of Muhammad.
Send Your peace upon the Proof, the Hidden, the Awaited, the one for whom the scholars compiled and debated and bled and died.
And grant us the honour of standing in his service — in this world and the next.

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.

A Story Inspired by This Session

Read “The Lamp Without Oil: A Lesson in Truth” — A Truth Promoters Vignette

We begin tonight with two verses from Surah Aal Imran (the Chapter of the Family of Imran).

Listen to them carefully — because everything we will discuss this evening is contained within them.

وَلَا تَحْسَبَنَّ الَّذِينَ قُتِلُوا فِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ أَمْوَاتًا ۚ بَلْ أَحْيَاءٌ عِندَ رَبِّهِمْ يُرْزَقُونَ فَرِحِينَ بِمَا آتَاهُمُ اللَّهُ مِن فَضْلِهِ وَيَسْتَبْشِرُونَ بِالَّذِينَ لَمْ يَلْحَقُوا بِهِم مِّنْ خَلْفِهِمْ أَلَّا خَوْفٌ عَلَيْهِمْ وَلَا هُمْ يَحْزَنُونَ

“Do not think of those killed in the way of God as dead. Rather, they are alive with their Lord, receiving provision, rejoicing in what God has granted them of His bounty, and receiving glad tidings about those who have not yet joined them from behind — that there shall be no fear upon them, nor shall they grieve.”

— Qur’an, Surah Aal Imran (the Chapter of the Family of Imran) #3, Verses 169–170

These verses tell us two things.

And I want us to hold both of them tonight — not just the first, which we are accustomed to hearing, but the second, which we too often let pass.

The first thing is this: the shaheed is alive.

This is not a metaphor.

This is not a consolation offered to the grieving to help them get through the night.

It is a correction.

God is correcting us.

He says

The verb here is about perception.

He is telling us that when we look at the martyrdom of our beloved ones and see death, we are seeing it wrong.

The shaheed — the martyr — has not ended.

The shaheed has arrived.

The second thing — and this is where I want us to pause — is what comes next in the verse.

They are receiving glad tidings — about whom?

About us.

About those who have not yet joined them.

About those who are still behind, still here, still in this world of trial and test.

Do you hear what that means?

It means the shaheed is not merely alive — the shaheed is watching.

They are looking back at us.

They are receiving news about us.

And the verse tells us they are either rejoicing at what they see — or they are waiting.

Waiting to see what we do with their blood.

Waiting to see whether their testimony will be carried forward, or whether it will be buried under our grief and our silence and our return to the comfortable routines that their sacrifice was meant to shatter.

That is what this evening is about.

Not only to mourn — though we will mourn.

Not only to remember — though we will remember.

But to ask ourselves a question that the blood of our shuhada (martyrs) has placed before us, and that this arba’een now demands we answer:

Video of the Sermon (Majlis/Lecture)

Audio of the Sermon (Majlis/Lecture)

Bridge: From the Unbroken Chain to the Unbroken Testimony

Some of you were with us — not so long ago — for a session we called The Unbroken Chain.

We gathered in the immediate aftermath of the martyrdom of our leader, Imam Sayyed Ali al-Husayni al-Khamenei — may God rest his pure soul.

The wound was fresh.

The shock had not yet settled.

And the question that hung over us that night was an urgent one:

What happens to the chain of wilayah when its most visible link is struck?

And the answer we arrived at — together, with the help of God and the guidance of the Ahlul Bayt — was that the chain does not break.

It has never broken.

Because it was never held together by any one man, however great that man was.

It is held together by God’s promise.

By the covenant that began with the Prophet, passed through the Imams, and continues — unbroken — through the institution of wilayat al-faqih until the return of the Imam of our time, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return.

That was the Unbroken Chain.

The institution.

The structure.

The divine architecture that outlives every individual who serves it.

Tonight, we shift our gaze.

Tonight, we do not ask what survives after the shaheed (martyr) is taken.

Tonight, we ask what the shaheed left behind.

Not an institution — a testimony.

A witness written in blood.

A message that does not merely echo — it amplifies.

It grows louder with every passing day, every passing generation, every empire that tries to silence it and fails.

If the Unbroken Chain was about the institution that endures, then the Unbroken Testimony is about the message that endures — and about the duty, the sacred obligation, that it places upon every single one of us who witnessed it.

We are forty days on from the martyrdom of our leader.

Forty days since the girls of Minab were taken from their schoolhouse by the bombs of an empire that calls itself civilised.

Forty days — and the number itself, as we shall see, is not incidental.

It is not arbitrary.

It is a threshold.

And tonight, by the grace of God, we will cross it together.

We will speak about three things.

First: the significance of forty — al-arba’een — in our theology, in our history, and in the broader tradition of the prophets.

Why forty?

What does this number do to those who endure it?

Second: the meaning of shaheed — a word we use constantly, but whose depth we rarely pause to excavate.

Why is the martyr called a witness?

What did they see?

And what does their death make visible to us?

And third: our duty.

Not the shaheed’s duty — that is fulfilled.

But ours.

What does it mean to be the ones who witnessed the witness?

What is asked of us now — not as mourners, but as the carriers of a testimony that must not die with our tears?

And we will close, God willing, with a remembrance of our beloved shuhada (martyrs) — from the earliest to the most recent — and a supplication that asks God to count us among those who were worthy of their sacrifice.

In the name of the Lord of the Martyrs and Truthful, let us begin.

Point 1: The Significance of Forty

Tonight is not an ordinary gathering.

It is an arba’een.

And before we speak about the shaheed (martyr), before we speak about our duty, I want us to understand what that word means — what the number forty does in the vocabulary of God.

Because forty is not arbitrary.

It is not a cultural convention.

It is not something our scholars invented.

It is a number that appears again and again — in the Qur’an, in the Sunnah, in the traditions of every prophet — and every single time it appears, it marks the same thing: a threshold.

A boundary between what was and what must now be.

A crucible in which something is either transformed or exposed.

Let me show you what I mean.

Moses (Musa) on the Mountain

God says in Surah Al-A’raf:

وَوَاعَدْنَا مُوسَىٰ ثَلَاثِينَ لَيْلَةً وَأَتْمَمْنَاهَا بِعَشْرٍ فَتَمَّ مِيقَاتُ رَبِّهِ أَرْبَعِينَ لَيْلَةً

“And We appointed for Moses thirty nights and completed them with ten, so the term of his Lord was completed as forty nights.”

— Qur’an, Surah Al-A’raf (the Chapter of the Heights) #7, Verse 142

Forty nights on the mountain.

Not thirty.

Not fifty.

Forty.

And notice — God did not give him the Tablets on the first night.

He did not reveal the divine speech on the tenth night, or the twentieth.

The Tablets came at the end of the forty.

The entire period was preparation.

Refinement.

Purification.

Moses — peace and blessings be upon him — a prophet already chosen, already spoken to at the burning bush, already entrusted with the mission to Pharaoh — even he needed forty nights of preparation before he was ready to receive the fullness of divine guidance.

The forty was not waiting.

The forty was becoming.

And here is what we often miss about this story:

While Moses was on the mountain being transformed, his people — down below — were being exposed.

They could not endure the forty.

They could not hold their faith for forty nights without their prophet in front of them.

And so they turned to the calf.

The same forty that refined Moses revealed the weakness of those who could not endure it.

Hold that thought.

We will return to it.

The Prophet at Forty

Our Prophet — peace and blessings be upon him, his family and righteous companions — received his first revelation and was formally appointed as the Messenger of God at the age of forty.

This is universally agreed upon across both Shia and Sunni traditions — there is no dispute on this point whatsoever.

Al-Ya’qubi records it in his Tarikh, his compendium on History.

Allamah al-Majlisi dedicates extensive narrations to it in volume 18 of Bihar al-Anwar.

Ayatullah Ja’far Subhani, in his masterful biography of the Prophet, titled The Message — discusses it in careful detail in the chapter on the first revelation.

Our tradition is highly specific about when this happened.

The Be’that — the formal appointment, the beginning of the prophetic mission — took place on the 27th of Rajab, in the Cave of Hira.

The Sunni traditions often place the first revelation in the month of Ramadhan, and our scholars have explained this distinction with precision: the mission itself, the appointment, began on the 27th of Rajab with the first verses of Surah Al-Alaq — the Chapter of the Clot —

ٱقۡرَأۡ بِٱسۡمِ رَبِّكَ ٱلَّذِي خَلَقَ

Read in the Name of your Lord who created;

— Qur’an, Surah al-Alaq (the Chapter of the Clot) #96, Verse 1

— while the complete, holistic reality of the Qur’an descended upon the Prophet’s heart later, during Laylat al-Qadr (the night of Destiny) in Ramadan, before being revealed piecemeal over the next twenty-three years.

But the point for us tonight is this: it happened at forty.

Not before.

Not after.

Forty years he lived among the people of Makkah.

Forty years of watching.

Forty years of witnessing their idolatry, their injustice, their burying of daughters, their worship of stone.

He would retreat to the Cave of Hira — year after year — in solitude, in contemplation, in a turning toward God that deepened with every passing season.

And all the while, the vessel was being shaped.

The forge was doing its work.

And when the vessel was ready — when the forty years of preparation had reached their completion — then came Gabriel.

Then came “Read”.

Then came the revelation that would reshape the world.

And here I want to share with you something extraordinary — a firsthand account of that moment from none other than Amir al-Mu’mineen, Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, peace and blessings be upon him.

In Sermon 192 of Nahj al-Balagha — known as the Sermon of al-Qasi’ah — Imam Ali describes being present. He says:

وَلَقَدْ كَانَ يُجَاوِرُ فِي كُلِّ سَنَةٍ بِحِرَاءَ، فَأَرَاهُ وَلَا يَرَاهُ غَيْرِي

“Every year he used to go in seclusion to the hill of Hira, where I saw him but no one else saw him.”

Pause on that.

Imam Ali was there.

Not as a passive bystander — as the one companion who was granted access to these retreats.

And then he describes the moment of revelation:

وَلَقَدْ سَمِعْتُ رَنَّةَ الشَّيْطَانِ حِينَ نَزَلَ الْوَحْيُ عَلَيْهِ (صلى الله عليه وآله)، فَقُلْتُ: يَا رَسُولَ اللَّهِ مَا هَذِهِ الرَّنَّةُ؟ فَقَالَ: هَذَا الشَّيْطَانُ قَدْ أَيِسَ مِنْ عِبَادَتِهِ. إِنَّكَ تَسْمَعُ مَا أَسْمَعُ، وَتَرَى مَا أَرَى، إِلَّا أَنَّكَ لَسْتَ بِنَبِيٍّ، وَلَكِنَّكَ لَوَزِيرٌ

“I heard the moan of Satan when the revelation descended upon him. I said, ‘O Messenger of God, what is this moan?’ And he replied, ‘This is Satan, who has lost all hope of being worshipped. O Ali, you see all that I see and you hear all that I hear, except that you are not a Prophet.’”

— Imam Ali, Nahj al-Balagha, Sermon 192, compiled by Sharif al-Radi

Two things to note here.

First — and this is a point our scholars emphasise with great care — the Prophet was not frightened.

He was not confused.

He did not doubt his sanity or question what was happening to him.

Our tradition firmly rejects any suggestion of this.

The Prophet had been prepared — by forty years of divine refinement — for exactly this moment.

He received the revelation with absolute certainty, with complete readiness.

The forty had done its work.

And second — the moan of Satan.

When the forty is completed, when the transformation reaches its fulfilment, the forces of falsehood know.

They feel it.

They lose hope.

That moan is the sound of an entire age of darkness realising that its time is ending.

Prophethood did not come to a youth in haste.

It came to a man who had been forged — quietly, patiently, over four decades — into someone capable of carrying the weight of the final message.

The forty was the forge.

And what emerged from that forge shook the throne of every tyrant from Makkah to the empires beyond.

The Hadith of Forty Days

And then there is this — a tradition from the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family and righteous companions, that goes to the very heart of what the number forty means for the human soul:

مَنْ أَخْلَصَ لِلَّهِ أَرْبَعِينَ يَوْمًا ظَهَرَتْ يَنَابِيعُ الْحِكْمَةِ مِنْ قَلْبِهِ عَلَىٰ لِسَانِهِ

“Whoever dedicates himself sincerely to God for forty days, the springs of wisdom will appear from his heart upon his tongue.”

— Ibn Fahd al-Hilli in Uddat al-Da’i wa Najah al-Sa’i; Allamah Majlisi, Bihar al-Anwar, Volume 67; Muhsin Faydh al-Kashani, Al-Wafi; Abu Nu’aym al-Isfahani, Hilyat al-Awliya, Al-Ghazali, Ihya Ulum al-Din

You will sometimes find this narrated with a slight variation — arba’eena sabahan, forty mornings, rather than arba’eena yawman, forty days — but the core meaning is identical.

Now, a word about this hadith for those of you who are students of the tradition — because I think it is important to be precise about what we are citing and on what authority.

In our tradition, this hadith is recorded by Ibn Fahd al-Hilli in Uddat al-Da’i wa Najah al-Sa’i — one of the great classical works on supplication and spiritual discipline.

From there, Allamah al-Majlisi transmits it in Bihar al-Anwar, volume 67.

Mulla Muhsin al-Fayd al-Kashani also records it in Al-Wafi.

In the Sunni tradition, it appears in Abu Nu’aym al-Isfahani’s Hilyat al-Awliya’ and is cited prominently by Imam al-Ghazali in the Ihya’ Ulum al-Din.

Now — I want to be transparent, because scholarship demands transparency.

From the strict perspective of hadith chain analysis — ilm al-rijal — the chains of transmission for this specific wording carry technical weakness.

In the Sunni tradition, scholars like al-Suyuti have graded it as da’if — weak —due to an interrupted transmission between Makhul and Abu Ayyub al-Ansari.

In our own tradition, one of the primary chains passes through Darim ibn Qabisah, whose reliability is not firmly established in the biographical dictionaries of al-Najashi.

So the chain is discussed.

That is the honest assessment.

But — and this is crucial — you will be hard-pressed to find a single Shia scholar of akhlaq or irfan who dismisses this hadith.

And the reason is this: the matn — the meaning, the content, the substance of what is being said — is universally accepted.

Not merely accepted — tested.

The great masters of our spiritual tradition — Mulla Sadra, Allamah Tabatabai, Imam Khomeini — they did not merely quote this hadith.

They lived it.

They practised the arba’iniyyah — the forty-day spiritual retreat of utter sincerity — and they found the Prophet’s promise to be a literal reality.

The springs of wisdom appeared.

The heart was unlocked.

The tongue was opened.

This is what our scholars call spiritual empiricism — the truth of the hadith is not only in its chain but in its result.

Generation after generation of wayfarers on the path to God have tested this forty-day threshold and found it to be exactly as the Prophet described.

And this is entirely consistent with the Qur’an itself.

God tells us in Surah Al-Ankabut — the Chapter of the Spider:

وَالَّذِينَ جَاهَدُوا فِينَا لَنَهْدِيَنَّهُمْ سُبُلَنَا

“And those who strive for Us — We will surely guide them to Our paths.”

— Qur’an, Surah Al-Ankabut (the Chapter of the Spider) #29, Verse 69

The principle is the same: sincerity of effort, over a sustained period, produces divine guidance.

The hadith of forty days gives this principle a specific frame — a measurable commitment, a defined threshold.

Forty days of ikhlas — sincerity.

Forty days of genuine turning.

And what emerges on the other side is not what went in.

And notice — when Imam Khomeini, may God rest his pure soul, taught this hadith to his students, he was building the spiritual foundations of a revolution.

The same revolution whose torch was carried for decades by our beloved Imam Khamenei.

There is a line — quiet but unbroken — between the mystic’s forty-day retreat and the shaheed’s forty-day arba’een.

Both are crucibles.

Both demand sincerity.

Both promise transformation.

So this is the key to understanding what an arba’een truly is.

It is not merely a mourning period.

It is not simply the custom of waiting forty days before holding a memorial.

It is a spiritual threshold — divinely appointed — in which transformation is not just possible but promised to the one who endures it with sincerity.

The scholars have tested it.

The mystics have walked it.

The Prophet — peace and blessings be upon him, his family and righteous companions — guaranteed it.

If you have spent these forty days — since the martyrdom of our leader, since the killing of the girls of Minab — if you have spent them in sincere grief, sincere reflection, sincere turning toward God, then something should have changed in you by now.

The springs should be flowing.

Wisdom should be appearing where before there was only anguish.

And if nothing has changed — then the forty is asking you why.

Forty Across the Traditions of the Prophets

And it is not only in our tradition.

The number forty echoes across the entire history of divine guidance — because the God who appointed it is One, and His methods are consistent.

Noah (Nuh) — peace and blessings be upon him — and the flood.

The rain fell for forty days and forty nights.

After the forty, the old world was gone — annihilated, washed clean.

A new world stood in its place.

The forty was not merely the duration of a storm.

It was the span required for a complete renewal — for the corruption to be washed away entirely and for something new to emerge from the water.

The Biblical tradition preserves this number in the book of Genesis; the Qur’an speaks of the flood itself, and the message is the same: the forty is the instrument of total transformation.

Jesus (Isa) — peace and blessings be upon him, and may God hasten his return — the son of Maryam — peace and blessings be upon her, spent forty days in the wilderness in fasting and solitude before he began his public mission.

The Gospel accounts in Matthew and Luke both record this.

Forty days of preparation — not retreat from the world, but preparation to re-enter it as something different from what he was before.

The wilderness did not weaken him.

It sharpened him.

It burned away everything that was not essential, and what remained was ready for the mission.

And Bani Isra’il — the children of Israel — wandered for forty years in the desert.

God tells us in Surah Al-Ma’idah — the Chapter of the Table Spread:

قَالَ فَإِنَّهَا مُحَرَّمَةٌ عَلَيْهِمْ ۛ أَرْبَعِينَ سَنَةً ۛ يَتِيهُونَ فِي الْأَرْضِ

“He said: Then it is forbidden to them for forty years; they shall wander in the earth.”

— Qur’an, Surah Al-Ma’idah (the Chapter of the Table Spread) #5, Verse26

Forty years.

An entire generation had to pass — the generation that was too afraid to enter the holy land, too compromised by its own weakness — before a new generation, forged in the desert, was ready to inherit the promise.

Do you see the pattern?

Across every tradition, every prophet, every dispensation — forty marks the boundary between before and after.

It is the threshold between the person you were and the person you are being asked to become.

Between the community that grieved and the community that rises.

Between the tears and the testimony.

The question that every arba’een places before those who observe it is this: which side of the boundary are you on?

Have you crossed it?

Or are you still standing at the threshold, mourning but unchanged, weeping but unwilling to move?

The Arba’een of Imam Husayn: The Paradigm

And nowhere is this clearer — nowhere is the transformative power of the forty more visible — than in the Arba’een of Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him.

The fortieth day after Ashura.

The day when two things happened that changed the meaning of Karbala forever.

The first: Jabir ibn Abdullah al-Ansari — the companion of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family and his righteous companions — arrived at the grave of Imam Husayn.

He was old.

He was blind.

He had crossed the desert to reach a grave in a land of desolation. And he became the first za’ir — the first pilgrim — to visit the resting place of the master of martyrs.

His journey is recorded by Ibn Quluwayh al-Qummi in Kamil al-Ziyarat, one of our earliest and most authoritative sources.

Think about what that means.

A blind old man, crossing the desert, to stand at a grave.

Why?

Because the forty had done its work on him.

The forty had transformed his grief into obligation.

He could not merely mourn from afar.

He had to go.

He had to be present.

He had to bear witness with his body, even if his eyes could no longer see.

That is what the forty does.

It will not let you sit still.

The second: the Ahlul Bayt — the surviving family of Imam Husayn — returned to Karbala from their captivity in Sham.

Led by Sayyedah Zaynab, and Imam Zayn al-Abidin, peace and blessings be upon them both, they came back to the place of slaughter.

This is recorded by Sayyed Ibn Tawus in Luhuf (Al-Malhuf ala Qatla al-Tufuf ( — The Sorrowful Sighs for the Martyrs of the Banks of the Euphrates) — though some historians discuss the precise dating, the tradition is powerful and deeply rooted.

And notice what happens at the Arba’een.

The mourning does not end — but it transforms.

The tears do not stop — but they take on a new purpose.

The survivors do not retreat into private grief.

They begin the work of testimony. Sayyedah Zaynab — who we will speak more about later tonight, God willing — does not weep in silence.

She speaks.

She testifies.

She takes the blood of her brother and makes it speak to the world.

The Arba’een of Imam Husayn is the moment when tragedy becomes movement.

When grief becomes revolution.

When the mourner becomes a witness.

And that is the model for every arba’een that has followed since.

Including this one.

The Arba’een of Imam Sayyed Ali al-Khamenei: Our Threshold

So here we are.

Forty days have passed.

Forty days since the martyrdom of Imam Sayyed Ali al-Husayni al-Khamenei — may God elevate his station and accept his sacrifice.

Forty days since the girls of Minab — young, bright, full of life and hope and future — were taken from their schoolhouse by the bombs of an empire that has lost every claim to moral authority it ever pretended to hold.

Forty days.

The same span that refined Moses on the mountain.

The same span that prepared Jesus in the wilderness.

The same span that separated the generation of fear from the generation of promise.

The same span that turned the mourning of Karbala into the movement that still shakes the thrones of the oppressors fourteen centuries later.

And the question the forty now puts to us is the same question it has always put to those who stand at its threshold:

Have these forty days changed you?

Have they sharpened something in you?

Have the springs of wisdom begun to flow?

Or have you merely endured them — counted the days, attended the gatherings, posted your tributes, and returned to the same life you were living before their blood was spilled?

Because the forty does not merely invite transformation.

As we saw with the people of Moses — with those who could not endure forty nights without turning to the calf — the forty also exposes.

It exposes who was sincere and who was not.

Who was truly shaken and who was only briefly moved.

Who will cross the threshold and who will remain standing at it, mourning without motion, grieving without growth.

Lesson for Today

The forty days have not been given to us for passive grief.

They are a crucible — a divine instrument of transformation.

The question this arba’een puts to every one of us tonight is this:

And here is my challenge to you — not as something abstract, but as something concrete, something you take with you when you leave this gathering tonight.

Commit to the next forty days.

Not forty days of mourning — that time has passed, and it has done its work.

Forty days of transformation.

Pick one thing — a practice, a commitment, a study, a change in habit — and dedicate the next forty days to it.

In the name of our shuhada.

In honour of their blood.

Perhaps it is a study — committing to read and understand one book of substance, one work that deepens your knowledge of your faith, your history, your responsibility.

Perhaps it is a practice — a prayer you have been neglecting, a discipline you have let slip, a relationship with God that has grown distant.

Perhaps it is a stand — a commitment to speak where you have been silent, to stop looking away from the injustice that the shuhada gave their lives to expose.

Whatever it is — make it specific.

Make it real.

And dedicate it to them.

Because the arba’een is not an ending.

It is not the last day of mourning.

It is the first day of whatever comes next.

And what comes next is up to you.

Point 2: The Shaheed as Witness

We have spoken about the forty — what it means, what it demands, what it transforms.

Now I want to turn to the one whose blood marks the beginning of this forty.

The shaheed.

We use this word constantly.

Every time a believer falls — in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, in Iraq — we say shaheed.

We say it with love.

We say it with grief.

We say it with honour.

But I want us to pause tonight and ask:

Because the word shaheed does not mean what most people think it means.

And understanding what it actually means will change everything about how we understand what happened forty days ago — and what is being asked of us now.

The Word Itself

The Arabic root is ش-ه-د — shin, ha, dal.

And from this single root come three meanings that are so intertwined they cannot be separated.

The great lexicographers — Ibn Manzur in Lisan al-Arab, al-Raghib al-Isfahani in his Mufradat Alfaz al-Qur’an — they lay these meanings out with a precision that takes your breath away.

The first meaning: shahida — to witness.

To be present.

To see something with your own eyes, to observe it directly.

The second meaning: shahida — to testify.

To bear witness.

To stand up and declare what you have seen.

The third meaning — and this is where the depth lies — shaheed, the form fa’eel in Arabic, carries both an active and a passive sense simultaneously.

The shaheed is the one who witnesses — who saw the truth so clearly, so completely, that they could not do anything but stand for it.

And the shaheed is the one who is witnessed — witnessed by God, seen by Him, known by Him, received by Him.

So when we call someone a shaheed, we are not saying: this person died.

We are not even saying: this person died bravely, or this person died for a cause.

We are saying something far more profound.

We are saying: this person saw.

They saw the truth — about God, about justice, about the nature of this world and the next — and what they saw was so overwhelming, so undeniable, that their entire being became a testimony to it.

Their life became a testimony.

And when their life was taken, their death became a testimony — louder, clearer, more permanent than anything they could have said while breathing.

The shaheed is not named for how they died.

The shaheed is named for what they saw — and for what their death now makes visible to the rest of us.

And I want you to notice something.

The English word “martyr” comes from the Greek martys — and it also means “witness.”

The same concept, across languages, across civilisations.

But in common Western usage, the word has lost its force.

A martyr, in the modern Western imagination, is someone who suffered.

Someone who was victimised.

There is a passivity to it — a sense that the martyr is defined by what was done to them.

In the Qur’anic usage, the opposite is true.

The shaheed is defined not by what was done to them, but by what they did.

They testified.

They bore witness.

Their death was not an ending — it was the opening statement in a trial that is still ongoing, a trial in which the oppressor stands accused and the shaheed’s blood is the evidence.

The First Shaheed: Habil at the Hands of Qabil

And this chain of testimony begins at the very beginning.

God tells us in Surah Al-Ma’idah — the Chapter of the Table Spread:

وَاتْلُ عَلَيْهِمْ نَبَأَ ابْنَيْ آدَمَ بِالْحَقِّ إِذْ قَرَّبَا قُرْبَانًا فَتُقُبِّلَ مِنْ أَحَدِهِمَا وَلَمْ يُتَقَبَّلْ مِنَ الْآخَرِ قَالَ لَأَقْتُلَنَّكَ ۖ قَالَ إِنَّمَا يَتَقَبَّلُ اللَّهُ مِنَ الْمُتَّقِينَ لَئِن بَسَطتَ إِلَيَّ يَدَكَ لِتَقْتُلَنِي مَا أَنَا بِبَاسِطٍ يَدِيَ إِلَيْكَ لِأَقْتُلَكَ ۖ إِنِّي أَخَافُ اللَّهَ رَبَّ الْعَالَمِينَ

“Recite to them the tale of the two sons of Adam in truth. When each offered a sacrifice, it was accepted from one and not from the other. He said: ‘I will surely kill you.’ He replied: ‘God only accepts from the God-conscious. If you stretch your hand toward me to kill me, I shall not stretch my hand toward you to kill you. Indeed, I fear God, the Lord of the worlds.’”

— Qur’an, Surah Al-Ma’idah (the Chapter of the Table Spread) #5, Verses 27–28

Habil — Abel — the son of Adam.

The first human being to die.

And look at how he died.

His brother said: I will kill you. And Habil’s response was not to fight, not to flee, not to beg.

His response was to testify.

This is the first shahadah in human history.

And notice what it says:

There is a truth that is worth more than my life.

I would rather die holding that truth than live having abandoned it.

Habil did not raise his hand.

Not because he was weak — but because raising his hand would have meant becoming his brother.

And he chose death over that.

He chose to testify — with his refusal, with his body, with his blood — that the way of God is not the way of violence, that submission to God means refusing to become the oppressor even when the oppressor is standing over you.

Every shaheed since has repeated this testimony.

In a thousand forms, across a thousand generations, in every land and every language — the same witness.

From Habil to Husayn.

From Husayn to the shuhada of our own time.

The form changes.

The testimony does not.

And in our Muharram sessions this year, God willing, we will walk this entire chain together.

From the first shaheed — the son of Adam who would not raise his hand — to the latest.

From Habil to the schoolgirls of Minab who never even had the chance to raise theirs.

We will trace this line of blood-testimony that runs through the whole of human history and ask: what is it saying?

What has it always been saying?

And what does it demand of those who hear it?

That is for Muharram, God willing.

But tonight, I want to plant the seed — because what we are discussing now is the root from which that entire series will grow.

The Qur’an Corrects Our Perception

Now let us return to our anchoring verse — but this time, I want to bring in a companion verse from Surah Al-Baqarah — the Chapter of the Cow — that sharpens the point even further.

God says:

وَلَا تَقُولُوا لِمَن يُقْتَلُ فِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ أَمْوَاتٌ ۚ بَلْ أَحْيَاءٌ وَلَٰكِن لَّا تَشْعُرُونَ

“And do not say of those who are killed in the way of God, ‘They are dead.’ Rather, they are alive, but you perceive it not.”

— Qur’an, Surah Al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow) #2, Verse 154

I want you to notice the verb.

This is a command.

This is a correction.

God is not offering comfort to the grieving.

He is correcting an error in how we see reality.

He is saying: when you look at the shaheed and you see death, you are wrong. You are perceiving something incorrectly.

The problem is not with the shaheed.

The problem is with us.

With our eyes.

With our categories.

We see a body and we think: finished.

We see blood and we think: loss.

We see a grave and we think: absence.

And God says:

The shaheed is alive.

And not alive in some diminished, metaphorical sense.

The verse in Surah Aal Imran tells us they are receiving provision — yurzaqun.

They are rejoicing — farihin.

They are receiving glad tidings — yastabshirun.

This is not the language of metaphor.

This is the language of a reality more real than the one we are standing in.

And here is the point I want you to carry with you: a living person can be pressured.

A living person can be threatened.

A living person can be bought, or broken, or silenced, or compromised.

A shaheed cannot.

A shaheed’s testimony is sealed.

It is final.

It is incorruptible.

No intelligence service can interrogate it.

No sanctions can weaken it.

No propaganda can distort it.

No assassination can end it — because the assassination is the testimony.

That is why empires fear martyrs.

Not because of what they did in life — but because of what they become in death.

The shaheed is the one witness the empire cannot cross-examine, cannot discredit, cannot make disappear.

The blood speaks.

And it does not stop speaking.

Two Testimonies, One Truth

And now I want to bring this to our present moment.

Because we are not here tonight to discuss martyrdom in the abstract.

We are here because specific human beings — people we knew, people we loved, people we followed — have entered this station.

And their blood is speaking to us right now.

I want to place two testimonies before you tonight.

They look different on the surface.

The world would categorise them differently.

But I want to show you that they are saying exactly the same thing.

The First Testimony: Imam Sayyed Ali al-Husayni al-Khamenei.

A lifetime of scholarship.

A lifetime of service.

Decades of carrying the weight of the wilayah on his shoulders — through an eight-year war that should have broken Iran, through sanctions designed to strangle a nation, through internal dissent and external pressure from every direction, through the assassinations of his brothers and his generals, through betrayals and conspiracies that would have crushed anyone of lesser resolve.

And through all of it — steadfast.

Through all of it — upright.

Through all of it — testifying.

Testifying that the project of Islamic governance is real, that it is possible, that it is worth defending with everything you have.

Testifying that resistance to empire is not a tactic to be abandoned when the cost gets too high — it is a covenant.

Testifying that the wilayah will not bend, will not kneel, will not negotiate away the blood of its martyrs for the comfort of a truce with the oppressor.

And then — after decades of this testimony, at the apex of his life’s work — he was taken.

Shaheed.

His blood joined the river that flows from Karbala to Minab to wherever the next testimony will be written.

His shahadah says:

The Second Testimony: The Girls of Minab.

Young.

At the very beginning of their lives.

Not on a battlefield — in a schoolhouse.

Not carrying weapons — carrying books.

Not making political statements — learning. Growing.

Looking forward to a future that was supposed to belong to them.

And then the bombs came.

The machinery of empire — the same empire that calls itself civilised, that lectures the world about human rights, that wraps its violence in the language of precision and necessity — dropped its ordnance on a school.

And those girls were taken.

Not because of anything they did.

Not because of any choice they made.

But because they existed — in the wrong place, at the wrong time, in the wrong country, under the wrong flag — in the eyes of an empire that has decided that Iranian lives are expendable.

They did not choose the battlefield.

The battlefield was brought to them.

They did not volunteer for shahadah.

Shahadah was imposed upon them.

And yet — and this is the profound and devastating truth — their testimony is no less powerful for being unchosen.

In some ways, it is more powerful.

Because the innocence of the shaheedat of Minab strips the empire of every excuse, every justification, every carefully constructed narrative about “strategic targets” and “acceptable losses.”

Their shahadah says:

Now — the world looks at these two testimonies and sees different categories.

The aged leader and the young students.

The political and the civilian.

The deliberate and the “collateral.”

But shahadah makes them one.

The root is the same.

The witness is the same.

Both testified — one with a lifetime of words and deeds, the other with a silence that screams louder than any speech — that this empire’s violence is illegitimate, and that standing in its path is itself an act of truth.

And here is the proof that the Qur’an is not speaking in metaphor when it says bal ahya’.

Look at what has happened in these forty days.

Look at what the blood of the shaheedat of Minab has done to the empire that spilled it.

It has become a catalyst.

It is shaking foundations that decades of diplomacy and negotiation could not shake.

The testimony of those girls — their innocence, their youth, the sheer obscenity of what was done to them — has pierced through every firewall of propaganda and reached the conscience of the world.

The empire meant to terrorise.

Instead, it testified against itself.

It handed the prosecution its most devastating exhibit.

The blood of the shaheed is a truth serum — and the empire was forced to swallow it.

بَلْ أَحْيَاءٌ عِندَ رَبِّهِمْ يُرْزَقُونَ

They are alive with their Lord, receiving provision.

— Qur’an, Surah Aal Imran (the Chapter of the Family of Imran) #3, Verses 169

They are alive.

And their testimony is working.

The Grammar of Witness: From the Ziyarat Arba’een

And so we come back — as we always do — to Imam Husayn.

Because every shahadah in history is a footnote to Karbala, and every arba’een is a reflection of the first.

From the Ziyarat Arba’een — attributed to Imam al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon on, transmitted through Safwan al-Jammal, and recorded in Kamil al-Ziyarat by Ibn Quluwayh and in Mafatih al-Jinan by Shaykh Abbas al-Qummi — we recite these words:

أَشْهَدُ أَنَّكَ قَدْ أَقَمْتَ الصَّلَاةَ وَآتَيْتَ الزَّكَاةَ وَأَمَرْتَ بِالْمَعْرُوفِ وَنَهَيْتَ عَنِ الْمُنكَرِ وَأَطَعْتَ اللَّهَ وَرَسُولَهُ حَتَّىٰ أَتَاكَ الْيَقِينُ

“I bear witness that you established the prayer, gave the zakat, enjoined the good, forbade the evil, and obeyed God and His Messenger until certainty came to you.”

— Ziyarat Arba’een

I want you to hear the verb.

Not:

Not:

Not:

When we recite this ziyarah — and we will recite a ziyarah together at the end of this programme tonight — we are not performing an act of nostalgia.

We are not simply paying our respects to someone who died a long time ago.

We are entering the chain of witness.

We are adding our voices to the testimony.

The shaheed testified with their blood.

We testify with our words — ashhadu.

With our presence — we are here, tonight, forty days on, and we have not forgotten.

With our commitment — we say: you established the prayer, you enjoined the good, you forbade the evil, and we see it, we affirm it, we carry it forward.

The grammar of the ziyarah does not allow passivity.

The word ashhadu makes us participants.

It makes us witnesses.

It pulls us out of the audience and into the courtroom.

And once you are in the courtroom, once you have said ashhadu, you cannot pretend you did not see what you saw.

Which brings us to the question — and this is where our session turns for the final time, God willing.

Lesson for Today

The shaheed’s testimony is not complete until someone receives it.

A witness who speaks to an empty courtroom has testified — yes — but justice requires a jury.

The testimony requires someone to hear it, to weigh it, to act upon it.

Tonight, you are the jury.

The blood of Imam Khamenei.

The blood of the girls of Minab.

The blood of Hajj Qassem.

The blood of Hajj Emad.

The blood of Sayyed Hassan.

The blood of Sayyed Hashem.

The blood of every shaheed in this unbroken chain that stretches from Habil to this very night — it has been presented as evidence.

It has been placed before you.

You have heard it.

You have seen it.

You have wept over it.

The question is not whether you heard the testimony.

You did.

You are here.

You heard it.

The question is:

Because a jury that hears the evidence and then goes home and does nothing — that is not a jury.

That is a spectator.

And the blood of the shaheed was not spilled for spectators.

Learn their names.

Learn their stories.

When the empire’s media erases them — when it calls its bombs “precision strikes” and its victims “collateral damage” and its wars “operations” — your duty, your minimum duty, the floor beneath which you cannot fall, is to say their names and tell the truth of what happened.

This is the most basic act of witness.

And even this — even this small thing — the empire fears.

Because the empire’s power depends on your silence.

And the shaheed’s testimony depends on your voice.

Point 3: The Duty of the Witness

So now we come to it.

The question that this entire evening has been building toward.

We have spoken about the forty — the crucible that transforms or exposes.

We have spoken about the shaheed — the one who sees the truth and testifies to it with their blood.

And now we must speak about ourselves.

Because there is a word we have not yet addressed tonight.

We have spoken about the shaheed — the one who testifies.

But the Arabic root gives us another word, equally important, equally binding:

The shaheed is the one who testifies with their life.

The shahid is the one who witnesses the testimony.

The one who was there.

The one who saw.

The one who heard.

That is us.

We witnessed the martyrdom of our leader.

We witnessed the killing of the girls of Minab.

We saw the images.

We heard the news.

We felt the blow.

And by witnessing it — whether we chose to or not — we entered the chain.

We became shahid.

Witnesses.

And with that word comes a duty that we cannot escape — not by grief, not by silence, not by pretending we did not see what we saw.

The shaheed has spoken.

Their testimony is sealed.

It is complete.

It is incorruptible.

The question now is:

The Paradigm: Sayyedah Zaynab — The First Transmitter

To understand our duty, we must go back to the one who defined it.

The one who stood at the very first crossroads between grief and testimony and chose — against every pressure, every threat, every instinct of self-preservation — to speak.

Sayyedah Zaynab, peace and blessings be upon her.

After Karbala, everything invited silence.

Imam Husayn and his companions had given everything.

The men were slain.

The tents were burned.

The family of the Prophet — the women, the children, Imam Zayn al-Abidin who was barely alive with fever — were chained and dragged from Karbala to Kufa, from Kufa to Sham.

Every circumstance said:

Sayyedah Zaynab refused all of it.

In the court of Ibn Ziyad in Kufa — she spoke.

In the streets, as the people watched the captives pass — she spoke.

And then, in the palace of Yazid himself, in the capital of the empire that had just murdered her brother, she stood — a woman in chains, in the seat of power of the most powerful man in the world — and she said:

أَظَنَنْتَ يَا يَزِيدُ حَيْثُ أَخَذْتَ عَلَيْنَا أَقْطَارَ الْأَرْضِ وَآفَاقَ السَّمَاءِ فَأَصْبَحْنَا نُسَاقُ كَمَا تُسَاقُ الْأُسَارَى أَنَّ بِنَا هَوَانًا عَلَى اللَّهِ وَبِكَ عَلَيْهِ كَرَامَةً

“Do you think, O Yazid, that by closing in on us from every direction of the earth and horizon of the sky, and by driving us like captives, that we are humiliated before God and that you are honoured before Him?”

And then — and these words should burn themselves into our hearts:

فَوَاللَّهِ لَا تَمْحُو ذِكْرَنَا وَلَا تُمِيتُ وَحْيَنَا

“By God, you shall never erase our memory, nor shall you extinguish our revelation.”

— Sayyedah Zaynab, as transmitted in Al-Ihtijaj by al-Tabarsi, Volume 2; Balaghat al-Nisa’ by Ibn Tayfur; and Bihar al-Anwar by Allamah al-Majlisi, Volume 45.

Fourteen centuries have passed.

And what is the verdict?

Has Yazid erased their memory?

Has any Yazid — in any age, in any form — managed to extinguish the revelation of Prophet Muhammad that Imam Husayn died to protect?

The answer stands in every majlis, in every arba’een procession, in every tear shed for Karbala from Najaf to London to Jakarta to São Paulo.

The answer is walking through the streets of Iraq every year — twenty million strong.

The answer is sitting in this room tonight.

Sayyedah Zaynab was right.

And she was right because she did not merely believe the testimony would survive — she ensured it.

She became the vehicle.

She became the transmitter.

She took the blood of Imam Husayn and translated it into a voice that the empire could not silence — a voice that echoes still, a voice that will echo until the return of the Imam of our time.

This is what it means to be a witness.

Not to watch.

Not to mourn.

To transmit.

To take the testimony of the shaheed and carry it — through your voice, through your actions, through your life — into the world.

And this is our model.

This is the standard we are measured against.

Not:

But:

Every generation needs its Sayyedah Zaynab.

Someone who receives the testimony and refuses to let it die in private grief.

Someone who speaks when the empire demands silence.

Someone who stands in the court of the oppressor — whatever form that court takes in their time — and says:

The question is whether this generation — our generation — will produce its Zaynabs.

Or whether we will be the ones who wept and then went home.

The Three Duties: Dhikr, Shahadah, Amal

Let me give you a framework.

Because duty, to be real, must be specific.

It must have steps.

It must be something you can measure yourself against.

I want to present three levels of obligation — three tiers of what it means to be a witness.

Each one builds on the one before.

Each one is necessary.

And each one demands more than the last.

The First Duty: ذِكْر — Dhikr — Remembrance

The most basic obligation of the witness:

Imam al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him, said:

أَحْيُوا أَمْرَنَا رَحِمَ اللَّهُ مَنْ أَحْيَا أَمْرَنَا

“Keep our cause alive. May God have mercy on the one who keeps our cause alive.”

— Narrated in Wasail al-Shi’a by Shaykh al-Hurr al-Amili, Vol. 14; also in Amali of Shaykh al-Saduq.

Ihya’ amrina — keep our cause alive.

This is not passive nostalgia.

This is not putting up a poster once a year and feeling you have done your part.

The verb is ihya’ — to give life, to vivify, to make alive.

It is an active, ongoing, relentless commitment to ensuring that the memory of the shaheed remains alive in the hearts and minds of the community and the world.

And this is what we are doing tonight.

This gathering — this arba’een — is an act of dhikr.

The noha — lamentation hymn — that our brother Abdullah will share with us tonight, the tribute that our dear sister Roberta has prepared, the documentary that sister Fatema has made, the poems and words that members of this community will offer — all of this is dhikr.

All of this is ihya’.

All of this is keeping the cause alive.

And it matters.

It matters enormously.

Because the empire’s first strategy is always erasure.

Before it lies about the shaheed, it tries to make you forget them entirely.

It floods the news cycle.

It buries yesterday’s atrocity under today’s distraction.

It makes the twenty-four-hour news wheel turn so fast that the blood of last month’s martyrs is dry before anyone has time to ask what happened.

Dhikr is the refusal to let that happen.

It is the act of stopping the wheel.

Of saying: no.

We will not move on.

We will not forget.

We will say their names.

This is the floor.

It is necessary.

It is noble.

But — it is the floor.

Not the ceiling.

The Second Duty: شَهَادَة — Shahadah — Testimony

The intermediate obligation:

God says in Surah Al-Baqarah:

وَلَا تَكْتُمُوا الشَّهَادَةَ ۚ وَمَن يَكْتُمْهَا فَإِنَّهُ آثِمٌ قَلْبُهُ

“And do not conceal testimony. Whoever conceals it — his heart is indeed sinful.”

— Qur’an, Surah Al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow) #2, Verse 283

Listen to the weight of this verse.

Do not suppress.

Do not bury.

The verb katama means to hide, to keep secret, to swallow down.

And the consequence?

Not his tongue.

Not his hand.

His heart.

The concealment of testimony corrupts the witness from the inside out.

Now — this verse is typically discussed in the context of legal testimony, of bearing witness in a court.

But its principle is universal, and tonight I want us to feel its universality.

Because we have witnessed something.

We have seen what happened to our leader.

We have seen what happened to the girls of Minab.

We have seen what this empire does in the dark while it lectures the world about light.

And the verse says:

If you have seen this, and you conceal it — if you remain silent when the truth requires your voice — then your heart is sinning.

Silence, in the face of what we have witnessed, is not neutrality.

It is not wisdom.

It is not pragmatism.

The Qur’an calls it what it is: a sin of the heart.

Shahadah — testimony — means carrying the shaheed’s witness beyond the walls of the majlis and into the world.

It means speaking the truth about what happened — in your conversations, in your communities, on your platforms, in your workplaces, in every space where the empire’s narrative goes unchallenged.

When the empire calls its bombs “precision strikes” — you say: they hit a school.

When the empire calls its victims “collateral damage” — you say their names.

When the empire calls its wars “operations” and its invasions “interventions” — you testify to what you saw.

Because you are a shahid.

You witnessed it.

And the Qur’an has told you: do not conceal what you witnessed.

And I want to share something with you here, because it is relevant and it is real.

Some of you may know that as part of our Truth Promoters network, we maintain a website — themartyr.net — whose sole purpose is exactly this: testimony.

Bearing witness.

Saying their names.

This website was first established years ago, after the martyrdom of Hajj Imad Mughniyeh, may God rest his pure soul.

It was an attempt to do what Sayyedah Zaynab did — to take the testimony of the shaheed and carry it forward, to chronicle their lives, to tell their stories, to ensure that the empire’s erasure machine would not succeed.

For various reasons — lack of support, lack of energy, the difficulties that come with swimming against the current — it went dormant for a period.

But the domain remained.

The seed was in the soil, waiting.

And now, God be praised, it continues.

And I mention this not to promote a website — but because it illustrates something important about shahadah.

The work of testimony is not glamorous.

It is not always met with support.

There are times when you will speak and no one will listen.

There are times when the audience is empty and the response is silence.

There are times when you will be mocked, or ignored, or worse.

But the duty remains.

The verse does not say:

It says:

The shaheed did not ask whether the timing was right before they testified.

The shaheed did not check the analytics.

The shaheed did not wait for a critical mass of support.

They saw the truth, and they spoke — with their blood.

And we are being asked to speak with far less cost.

Just our voices.

Just our presence.

Just our refusal to be silent.

The Third Duty: عَمَل — Amal — Action — Living Testimony

The highest obligation:

This is attributed to Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him — and in some transmissions to Imam al-Baqir, peace and blessings be upon him — as narrated in Al-Kafi by Shaykh al-Kulayni, in the chapter on truthfulness, and by Hurr al-Ameli in Was’ail al-Shia in the book of jihad, the chapter on truthfulness and obligation of piety:

كُونُوا دُعَاةً لِلنَّاسِ بِغَيْرِ أَلْسِنَتِكُمْ لِيَرَوْا مِنْكُمُ الِاجْتِهَادَ وَالصِّدْقَ وَالْوَرَعَ

“Be callers to the people without your tongues — let them see from you striving, truthfulness, and piety.”

— Al-Kulayni, Al-Kafi, Volume 2, Chapter on Truthfulness and Returning the Trust, Page 105, Hadith 10; Hurr al-Ameli, Wasa’il al-Shia, Book of Jihad, Chapter on the Obligation of Piety, Volume 15, Page 246, Hadith 20387

Not through speeches.

Not through sermons.

Not through posts and shares and hashtags. Through your life.

Through what people see when they watch you.

Through the striving — al-ijtihad.

The truthfulness — al-sidq.

The piety — al-wara’.

This is the highest form of testimony.

And it is the one that most of us find the hardest — because it does not allow for performance.

It does not allow for the gap between what we say and what we do. It demands that our daily lives — our actual, mundane, ordinary lives — become the evidence.

And this is where the arba’een transformation from Point 1 comes full circle.

Remember what we said: the forty is a crucible.

It does not merely invite change — it demands it.

You entered this forty as a mourner.

The question is:

If Imam Khamenei spent his life building a society grounded in Islamic governance, justice, and resistance to empire — what are you building?

And I don’t mean building a state.

I mean: in your home, in your family, in your workplace, in your community — what are you building?

Is it aligned with the values he died defending?

Or have you compartmentalised him — honouring his memory on Saturday nights and living by a different set of values the rest of the week?

If the girls of Minab went to school because they believed in a future — what future are you working toward?

Are you educating your children with the same hope, the same commitment to knowledge, the same belief that learning matters even when the bombs are falling?

Or have you surrendered your children’s minds to the empire’s entertainment machine and called it pragmatism?

These are not rhetorical questions.

These are the questions that amal — living testimony — demands we answer.

Not with words.

With choices.

With the actual, observable shape of our lives.

What It Means to Be a Witness Today

Let me make this concrete.

Because I do not want anyone to leave tonight thinking this is abstract — thinking this is beautiful theology that applies to someone else, somewhere else, in some other time.

This is about you.

Here.

Now.

Tomorrow morning.

In the age of information warfare — being a shahid means refusing the empire’s framing.

It means catching yourself when you use their language — when you say “conflict” instead of “aggression,” when you say “tensions” instead of “occupation,” when you say “both sides” when there is a bomber and a school.

It means correcting the record, not once in a dramatic moment, but consistently, patiently, in every conversation where the truth is being bent.

In the age of distraction — being a shahid means refusing to let the news cycle bury them.

The empire’s strategy is not always to lie.

Sometimes it is simply to move on.

To flood the feed with the next outrage, the next scandal, the next spectacle, until yesterday’s atrocity feels like ancient history and last month’s martyrs are forgotten.

Your duty is to resist that current.

To be the one who says — no, we are still talking about this.

We are still talking about Minab.

We are still talking about Gaza.

We are still talking about Lebanon.

We have not moved on.

We will not move on.

In the age of helplessness — and this is perhaps the most important — being a shahid means refusing despair.

Because despair is the empire’s most powerful weapon.

More powerful than its bombs, more powerful than its propaganda.

If it can make you believe that nothing will change, that resistance is futile, that the machine is too big and too strong — then it has silenced you more effectively than any censorship ever could.

But the shaheed’s testimony is inherently hopeful.

Think about it.

The shaheed testified because they believed the truth matters.

They gave their life because they believed — with a certainty that survived the approach of death itself — that the truth will prevail.

To despair is to contradict their witness.

To give up is to say: you died for nothing.

And we know — by the Qur’an, by the evidence of history, by the testimony of every shaheed from Habil to tonight — that they did not die for nothing.

So do not despair.

The empire looks strong.

It always looks strong.

Yazid looked strong.

Pharaoh looked strong.

Every oppressor in history looked strong — right up until the moment they didn’t.

And what brought them down was never a bigger army.

It was a testimony that would not die.

It was a people who refused to be silent.

It was a Sayyedah Zaynab who stood in the court and said:

And if you want proof that the testimony is working, you do not need to open a history book.

You need only open your eyes.

Look at what has unfolded in our lifetime.

The people of Gaza — besieged, starved, bombed, caged for decades — chose to no longer be forgotten.

They became their own shahideen.

They made their own amal.

They stood — with almost nothing — against one of the most heavily armed regimes on earth and said:

And they did not stand alone.

Their brethren in Lebanon rose — and gave sacrifices so monumental that history will spend generations reckoning with what Hizbullah offered on the altar of Palestine.

Their brethren in Yemen — a people themselves ravaged by years of war, by the schemes of puppet regimes doing the bidding of the empire and its allies — Yemen, battered and bleeding, stood up and blockaded the sea lanes of the oppressor.

With almost nothing.

Against the mightiest navy in the world.

And they have not blinked.

And Iran. Iran that has borne forty-seven years of crippling sanctions — forty-seven years — simply for refusing to let the Palestinian cause go quietly into the night.

Iran that has buried its generals, its scientists, its leaders — one after another, assassination after assassination — and has not broken.

Iran that is being bombed, as we sit here tonight, by an empire that fires its own generals for warning against war crimes, and whose leader speaks to the world in a language so vulgar, so unhinged, so devoid of any pretence of civilisation, that even those who once called themselves his allies are turning away in disgust.

And when the empire struck the highest branch — when it took from us the Wali al-Faqih himself — what happened?

Did the institution collapse?

Did the project of Islamic governance crumble without its leader, as the empire’s strategists no doubt prayed it would?

No.

Within a week — one week — the Assembly of Experts had appointed Imam Sayyed Mujtaba al-Khamenei as the new leader, the new Wali al-Faqih.

And he has risen to that trust.

He is working.

He is struggling.

He is teaching.

He is standing firm on the path of his father — and the path of his forefathers, the Ahlul Bayt, peace and blessings be upon them all.

The chain did not break.

We said this in The Unbroken Chain, and the evidence stands before us: the wilayah continues, the testimony continues, the resistance continues.

The empire took the man — and the institution answered within days.

That is not weakness.

That is a civilisation that has built something the empire cannot comprehend — because the empire builds on individuals and interests, and the wilayah is built on covenant and divine promise.

Listen to how the empire speaks now.

Not with the measured confidence of the powerful — but with the desperate, flailing obscenity of a bully who can feel the ground shifting beneath him.

That is not the language of strength.

That is the language of an order that is coming apart.

When a man must threaten war crimes openly, when he must scream his threats into the void because his whispered commands no longer produce obedience — that man is not in control.

He is in freefall.

And it is not only the Muslims who see it.

When the leader of over a billion Catholics — the Pope himself — looks at the empire’s ambassador and says:

— something has shifted in the world.

The testimony of the shuhada has reached ears that the empire thought were permanently closed.

Consciences that were meant to stay asleep are waking up.

The witness is spreading — beyond the ummah, beyond the borders the empire built to contain it.

And all the while — and we must never let this slip from our sight, not for a single day — the children of Gaza still starve.

The mothers and fathers and elders of Gaza still endure a genocide that the world watches in real time on its screens and struggles to stop.

The machinery of death has not stopped.

The testimony is not yet complete.

The trial is still in session.

But the verdict is coming.

It is coming because the shaheed’s blood does not dry.

It does not fade.

It does not become yesterday’s news.

It accumulates.

It testifies.

And the courtroom of history has never — not once — returned a final verdict in favour of the oppressor.

So do not despair.

Do not look at the bombs and the sanctions and the vulgarity of the powerful and conclude that nothing can be done.

Everything that is happening — from Gaza to Yemen to Lebanon to Iran to the crumbling alliances of the empire — all of it began with a people who refused to be silent.

All of it began with testimony.

All of it began with someone — somewhere — saying:

The Story of This Room

And I want to say one more thing before we close this point — and this is not from a book or a hadith.

This is about us.

About this gathering.

About how we came to be sitting here tonight.

This group — Truth Promoters — did not begin with a strategic plan.

It did not begin with funding or institutional support or a grand vision.

It began the way most true things begin: with grief, and with the refusal to let grief be the final word.

After the martyrdom of Hajj Qassem Soleimani — may God rest his pure soul — a small group of believers found each other.

We were scattered.

We were hurting.

Some of us had known Hajj Qassem personally — as a teacher, a mentor, someone who moved us toward God with a gentleness that belied the ferocity of his commitment on the battlefield.

And we needed — simply needed — to be together.

To console each other.

To make sense of what had happened.

So we started talking.

On Saturday calls.

On Zoom, on Jitsi, on Telegram — whatever platform would hold us.

And the attendance, brothers and sisters — I will be honest with you — there were sessions where it was two people.

Two.

Just two believers, on opposite sides of the same house, on their separate devices, refusing to let the conversation die.

That is what we started with.

Not a movement.

Not a programme.

Two people and an internet connection and a refusal to be silent.

And then — slowly, painfully, with setbacks and long stretches of almost nothing — others joined.

The genocide in Gaza awakened something.

The martyrdom of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in September 2024 — may God rest his pure soul — was a blow that could have broken us, but instead it sharpened us.

We began recording.

We began teaching.

We began building — the sessions, the websites, the resources, the network.

Themartyr.net was revived.

This programme — our Wednesday Majalis, our Saturday Majalis — was born.

Why am I telling you this?

Not for credit.

Not for history.

I am telling you this because it is the proof of what I have been saying tonight.

The testimony of the shaheed works.

It transforms.

It transmits.

It takes two grieving believers on their laptops and — over time, with patience, with the help of God — it builds something.

Not because they were special.

Not because they had resources or connections or support.

But because they received the testimony and refused to conceal it.

And look at where we are tonight.

An arba’een gathering.

A community.

A sister who has never formally entered Islam, preparing a tribute with love.

A brother whose hymn will shake this room.

A young woman who has produced a documentary with skill and devotion.

And you — every one of you — who chose to be here, on a Saturday evening, forty days on, to say:

This is what happens when you receive the testimony and act on it.

Not grand things.

Real things.

Small things that grow.

Seeds that become trees — and if you are hearing an echo of our brother Abdullah’s noha, you are hearing correctly.

Lesson for Today

The most dangerous thing an empire can face is not a martyr.

Empires have always killed.

They are experts at killing.

They have built entire economies around killing.

Another body does not frighten them.

What frightens them — what keeps the strategists awake, what the intelligence agencies write their reports about — is a people who received the martyr’s testimony and refused to be silent.

That is what Sayyedah Zaynab built in the court of Yazid.

That is what the arba’een produces — every year, in every generation, in every corner of the ummah.

That is what a handful of believers on a Saturday call can become, by the grace of God, if they refuse to let the testimony die.

And that is what you are being called to become tonight.

Not mourners — witnesses.

Not an audience — transmitters.

Not spectators at a trial — the jury, the advocates, the ones who carry the evidence out of the courtroom and into the world.

The shaheed has spoken.

Their testimony is complete.

It is sealed.

It is alive with God and it is working in this world — you can see it working, right now, in the crumbling of the empire’s legitimacy, in the awakening of consciences across the globe.

Now it is your turn.

Before you leave this gathering tonight — before you step out of this room and back into the world that the shaheed’s blood is trying to change — decide:

Not in grand gestures.

Not in dramatic sacrifices.

In daily life.

In what you read.

In what you share.

In what you teach your children.

In how you spend your money.

In where you direct your energy.

In the words you choose when someone asks you what happened.

In the refusal to look away when looking away would be easier.

The shahadah of the shaheed was dramatic because it had to be.

Yours can be quiet — but it must be real.

Pick one thing.

One concrete thing.

And begin tomorrow.

In their name.

In honour of their blood.

As your testimony — your shahadah — that you received their witness, and you will not let it die.

A Supplication-Eulogy in Two Parts

We have spoken tonight about the forty, and what it demands of us.

We have spoken about the shaheed, and what their blood is saying to the world.

We have spoken about our duty — as witnesses, as transmitters, as the ones who must carry the testimony forward.

Now I ask you to set all of that aside for a moment.

Not to forget it — you will carry it with you, God willing, when you leave tonight.

But to set it aside — because what I want to do now is not teach.

It is not argue.

It is not challenge.

What I want to do now is remember.

Simply remember.

To say their names.

To let their names fill this room. And then — together — to turn to the One who received them, and ask Him to make us worthy of what they gave.

Part 1: The Naming — المرثية

We remember tonight the shuhada of this ummah — those whose blood is the ink in which the testimony of truth is written.

We remember tonight those whose names we know, and those whose names only God knows.

The named and the unnamed.

The leaders and the unknown.

The generals and the schoolgirls.

Every one of them —

We remember Sayyed Abbas al-Musawi — may God bless his pure soul.

The one who built the resistance in Lebanon from nothing — from the rubble of occupation, from the ashes of invasion, from the determination of a people who had been told they were too weak to fight.

He built it with his hands and his faith and his scholarship.

And when the empire came for him, it did not come for him alone — it killed his wife.

It killed his child.

It murdered an entire family and called it a military operation.

But what he built did not die with him.

What he built stood for decades after him.

What he built shook the earth.

We remember Hajj Imad Mughniyeh — may God bless his pure soul.

The shadow that empires could not outrun.

The architect of resistance whose brilliance was matched only by his devotion to God and to the cause of the oppressed.

He moved through the world like a whisper — unseen, unheard, but felt in every blow the resistance struck against the occupier.

They hunted him for decades.

They feared him like they feared no one else.

And when they finally reached him in Damascus, his martyrdom did not end the fear — it deepened the resolve of every brother and sister who walked in his path.

We remember Hajj Qassem Soleimani — may God bless his pure soul.

The general who wept.

The commander who knelt at the grave of Imam Husayn and sobbed like a child.

The strategist who crossed every border the empire tried to build — every wall, every sanction, every line in the sand — and carried the cause of Palestine on his shoulders from Tehran to Baghdad to Beirut to Damascus and beyond.

They struck him down with a coward’s weapon on the road from Baghdad airport — a drone, fired from a continent away, by men who would not dare face him in the light.

And his blood watered the tree of resistance across an entire region.

Some of us in this room knew him.

Knew his gentleness.

Knew the way he would speak to you — not as a general to a subordinate, but as a father, as a brother, as someone whose only concern was to move you closer to God and further from your own nafs.

That gentleness — that impossible combination of ferocity on the battlefield and tenderness in person — that was Hajj Qassem.

And the world has not seen his like since.

And perhaps will not again, until the coming of the one we await.

We remember Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah — may God bless his pure soul.

The voice.

The voice of the oppressed that rang out from Dahiyeh and was heard in every village in the south, in every refugee camp, in every heart that had been told that resistance was impossible.

He looked the empire in the eye — for decades — and he never blinked.

Not once.

Not when they bombed Beirut in 2006.

Not when they killed his own son.

Not when the entire weight of the Zionist machine was pointed at his chest.

He spoke and the ummah listened.

He promised and he delivered.

He laughed — Oh my Lord, that laugh — and the oppressor trembled.

They buried eighty-two bunker busters into the earth to reach him.

Eighty-two.

Because one was not enough.

Because ten were not enough.

Because even in death, they were afraid of him.

And they were right to be afraid — because his words have not stopped.

His voice has not gone silent.

It echoes tonight in this room, and in every room where believers gather and refuse to surrender.

We remember the shuhada of Gaza — may God bless each and every one of them.

The tens of thousands.

The children pulled from rubble with dust still in their hair.

The mothers who shielded their babies with their bodies and were buried with them.

The fathers who searched through the wreckage with bare hands calling names that no one answered.

The doctors who operated by torchlight until the torchlight was bombed.

The journalists who filmed their own genocide so the world could not say it did not know — and were killed for filming it.

We cannot name them all tonight.

No single gathering could hold all their names.

But God knows every one.

Every name.

Every face.

Every last breath.

And they are alive with Him, and they are rejoicing, and they are waiting — waiting for us.

We remember the shaheedat of Minab — may God bless each and every one of them.

The girls.

The schoolgirls.

Young, bright, full of life and promise and future.

They went to school that morning the way every child goes to school — with their bags and their books and their friendships and their small, precious hopes for the day ahead.

And the empire’s bombs found them there.

They did not choose the battlefield.

They did not choose shahadah.

Shahadah was brought to their classroom door and forced its way in.

And in their innocence — in the sheer, unbearable purity of what they were and what was done to them — they have become the most devastating testimony against the empire that this generation has seen.

Their blood is not merely crying out for justice.

It is producing justice.

It is shaking foundations.

It is ending alliances.

It is stripping masks from faces that have worn them for decades.

May God envelope them in His mercy.

May He reunite them with their families in the highest gardens.

May He make their innocence a weight on the scales against every hand that was complicit in their murder — from the pilot who dropped the bomb to the president who gave the order to the system that made it all possible.

We remember Imam Sayyed Ali al-Husayni al-Khamenei — may God bless his pure soul.

Al-waliyy.

Al-faqih.

Al-mujahid.

Al-shaheed.

The one who held the trust of the Imam of our time for decades — and never once set it down.

Not in the eight years of sacred defence when the world armed his enemy and starved his people.

Not in the decades of sanctions designed to bring a nation to its knees.

Not when they took his generals, one by one — Hajj Imad, Hajj Qassem, Sayyed Hassan — each loss a wound that would have broken a lesser man.

Not when the conspirators plotted from within and the enemies pressed from without.

Not when the weight of an entire ummah’s expectations rested on his shoulders and the resources to meet them were stripped away by an unjust world.

Through all of it — steadfast.

Through all of it — upright.

Through all of it — his hand extended to the oppressed, his face turned toward the Imam of the age, his heart anchored in the covenant of wilayah.

He warned us.

He guided us.

He taught us.

He wept with us.

He prayed for us.

He carried what we could not carry.

He saw what we could not see.

And he did all of this — for decades — knowing that the path he walked would end where it ended.

Knowing that the shaheed’s road has only one destination.

And walking it anyway.

Without hesitation.

Without regret.

Forty days ago, he arrived.

He is alive.

He is with his Lord.

He is rejoicing.

And he is receiving glad tidings — about us.

About what we will do next.

About whether we will be worthy of the trust he left behind.

And we feel his absence tonight like a wound that has not yet learned to scar.

Like a space in the room that nothing can fill. Like a silence where his voice used to be.

But the silence is not empty.

It is full of his testimony.

It is asking us a question.

And the question is the same question this entire evening has been asking:

Part 2: The Turn — الدعاء

O Our Lord!

You have told us that the shuhada are alive with You.
That they are receiving provision.
That they are rejoicing.
We believe this.
We hold to this.
We cling to this with everything we have — because without this belief, the weight of what has been taken from us would be unbearable.

But Our Lord — we who are left behind, we who are still in this world of trial and test and temptation — we need Your help.
We are weak where they were strong.
We are uncertain where they were sure.
We are hesitant where they were decisive.
We need You.

O Our Lord!

You took from us a leader, a father, a guide — Imam Sayyed Ali al-Khamenei — and in his place You left us a testimony.
A testimony written in his blood, sealed by his sacrifice, carried now by his son and by every believer who received it.
Help us to carry it.
Help us to be worthy of it.
Do not let us be among those who heard the truth and then forgot.
Do not let us be among those who wept at the arba’een and then returned to heedlessness — who mourned on Saturday and forgot by Monday — who shed tears for the shaheed and then lived as though the shaheed died for nothing.

Oh Our Lord!

You have shown us — through the blood of the innocent, through the schoolgirls of Minab, through the children of Gaza pulled from the rubble with their mothers’ arms still around them —
You have shown us what this empire truly is.
What it does in the dark.
What it does in the light.
What it does to children.
Give us the clarity to see it for what it is.
Give us the courage to say what we see.
And give us the strength — Oh Our Lord, the strength — to resist it.
Not tomorrow.
Not when the conditions are right.
Now.
Today.
With whatever we have.

Oh Our Lord!

Bless and protect, Imam Sayyed Mujtaba al-Khamenei, the successor of his father, the bearer of the trust.
Strengthen his hands.
Sharpen his sight.
Surround him with those who are sincere.
Protect him from those who would betray.
And make him — as his father was — a lantern on the path of the Ahlul Bayt, a shield for the oppressed, and a thorn in the side of every oppressor.

Oh Our Lord

Count us among the shuhada — not necessarily those who die for the truth, but those who live for it.
Make our lives a testimony.
Make our choices a witness.
Make our silence impossible when injustice speaks.
Make us among those who received the testimony of the shaheed and did not conceal it — who carried it forward, who transmitted it, who refused to be silent even when silence was safer, even when silence was easier, even when silence was all the world demanded of us.

Oh Our Lord

We ask You — by the blood of Husayn ibn Ali, shed on the plains of Karbala and not yet dry.

We ask You — by the tears of Zaynab bint Ali, shed in the court of the oppressor and not yet wiped.

We ask You — by the patience of Ali ibn al-Husayn, who bore the unbearable and did not break.

We ask You — by the steadfastness of every shaheed from Habil the son of Adam to the last soul who fell in Your path this very day.

We ask You — hasten the return of the one whose coming will complete every testimony.
The one whose appearance will answer every cry.
The one who will fill the earth with justice as it has been filled with oppression.
The one we wait for, the one we weep for, the one we live for.

The Master of the Age, may our souls be his ransom

Hasten, Oh Our Lord, his noble relief.
Hasten his coming.
And make us — all of us in this room tonight — among his helpers, his supporters, his soldiers, his witnesses.

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.

Tonight, we begin with neither a verse of the Qur’an nor a hadith of the Imams — but with something rarer.

We begin with a letter.

A letter written in the hand of the Twelfth Imam — may God hasten his return, and may our souls be his ransom — delivered through his final Deputy, Ali ibn Muhammad al-Samarri, in the year 329 after the Hijrah.

It is the last direct communication from the living Imam to his community. And in it, one sentence changed everything:

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.”

— Al-Saduq, Kamal al-Din wa Tamam al-Ni’mah, Volume 2, Chapter 45, Hadith 4; also recorded in Bihar al-Anwar, Volume 53

Listen to the architecture of this sentence.

The Imam does not say:

He does not say:

He says:

— go to the scholars who carry our words.

And then he raises them to a station that no political appointment, no royal decree, no worldly authority could ever confer:

The scholars are the Imam’s proof.

And the Imam is God’s proof upon them.

This single sentence is the constitutional charter of the Marja’iyyah.

Everything we will study tonight — and in every session that follows in this series — flows from this.

Video of the Sermon (Majlis/Lecture)

Audio of the Sermon (Majlis/Lecture)

Introduction

Imagine, if you can, the year 329 after the Hijrah.

For seventy years — the span of an entire human life — the Shi’a had lived with a thin lifeline.

The Imam was hidden, yes.

But he was not silent.

Through four successive Special Deputies — the Sufara’ — letters came.

Questions were answered.

Guidance was given.

Disputes were settled.

The community could not see its Imam, but it could still hear him.

And then, in that year, the final letter arrived.

And the final letter said: the door is closed.

فَقَدْ وَقَعَتِ الْغَيْبَةُ التَّامَّةُ، فَلَا ظُهُورَ إِلَّا بِإِذْنِ اللَّهِ تَعَالَى ذِكْرُهُ، وَذَلِكَ بَعْدَ طُولِ الْأَمَدِ، وَقَسْوَةِ الْقُلُوبِ، وَامْتِلَاءِ الْأَرْضِ جَوْرًا. وَسَيَأْتِي لِشِيعَتِي مَنْ يَدَّعِي الْمُشَاهَدَةَ، أَلَا فَمَنِ ادَّعَى الْمُشَاهَدَةَ قَبْلَ خُرُوجِ السُّفْيَانِيِّ وَالصَّيْحَةِ فَهُوَ كَذَّابٌ مُفْتَرٍ، وَلَا حَوْلَ وَلَا قُوَّةَ إِلَّا بِاللَّهِ الْعَلِيِّ الْعَظِيمِ

“The complete Occultation has now occurred. There shall be no appearance except by the permission of God, exalted be His mention, and that shall be after a lengthy period, and the hardening of hearts, and the earth being filled with injustice. And there shall come to my Shi’a those who claim to have seen me. Behold — whoever claims to have seen me before the rising of the Sufyani and the heavenly Cry, he is a liar and a fabricator. And there is no power and no strength except through God, the Most High, the Most Great.”

— From the final Tawqi’ (letter) of Imam al-Mahdi (aj) to his Fourth Deputy, Ali ibn Muhammad al-Samarri, in the year 329 AH. Recorded in: Al-Tusi, Kitab al-Ghayba (The Book of Occultation), Hadith 365; Al-Saduq, Kamal al-Din wa Tamam al-Ni’mah; Al-Tabrisi, Al-Ihtijaj

No more letters.

No more Deputies.

No more lifeline.

Now what?

This is not a rhetorical question.

This is the most serious crisis any religious community has ever faced.

Because the Shi’a are not simply a community that reveres a historical figure.

The entire architecture of Shi’ism — its theology, its law, its spirituality — is built on the premise of a living, present, accessible Imam.

Remove that access, and what remains?

A collection of memories?

A library of texts?

A community slowly drifting apart, as communities do when the centre no longer holds?

The answer — and the subject of tonight’s session — is that what remained was not drift.

What remained was construction.

Because the Imam, in his final communication — the Tawqi’ we have just heard — did not leave the community without direction.

He pointed them to the scholars.

And the scholars understood: if we do not act now, if we do not gather, compile, preserve, and transmit everything the Imams taught us — then the light will not merely be hidden.

It will be lost.

Tonight, we meet the men who ensured it was not lost.

Recap

In our previous session — “The University of al-Sadiq: Four Thousand Students and a Living Imam” — we stood in the classroom of Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq, peace be upon him.

We saw the fountainhead: four thousand students, a curriculum that ranged from jurisprudence to chemistry, a circle so vast that even the founders of the four Sunni schools drank from it.

We honoured those schools — Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, Hanbali — as branches from the same tree, and we were careful to distinguish the Hanbali school of Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal — the man who was imprisoned and flogged rather than compromise his beliefs — from the later Wahhabi deviation that claimed his name while demolishing the graves of the Ahl al-Bayt and declaring the majority of Muslims to be polytheists.

A school must be judged by its founder and its mainstream tradition, not by its most extreme offspring.

And then we traced the darkness that followed: the Abbasid betrayal, the systematic poisoning and imprisonment of the Imams, the escalating persecution that made the Occultation both a divine mercy and an existential crisis.

That session ended at the threshold.

Tonight, we cross it.

If “The University of al-Sadiq” was about what the Imam built, tonight is about what happened when the builder was hidden — and the students had to become builders themselves.

Point 1: The Codification Race — Shaykh al-Kulayni and the Compiling of Al-Kafi

The Man from Kulayn

In the village of Kulayn — a small settlement near Rey, south of what is today Tehran — a boy was born who would grow up to save a civilisation’s memory.

His name was Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Ya’qub.

History knows him as Shaykh al-Kulayni — simply, “the one from Kulayn.”

It is one of the humilities of this tradition that its greatest compiler is named not after a title or a dynasty, but after a village most people have never heard of.

Shaykh al-Kulayni rose to become the religious leader of the Shi’a in Rey — a major centre of learning in its own right — and later migrated to Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphate and the most intellectually vibrant city in the world.

The great biographical scholar al-Najashi described him as the most meticulous and trustworthy person of his time in the narration of hadith.

أَوْثَقُ النَّاسِ فِي الْحَدِيثِ وَأَثْبَتُهُمْ

“The most reliable of people in hadith, and the most precise among them.”

— Al-Najashi, Rijal al-Najashi, Entry on Muhammad ibn Ya’qub al-Kulayni, p. 377

And here is the detail that frames everything: Shaykh al-Kulayni was born around the year 250 AH — roughly a decade before the Occultation began.

He lived through the entire seventy years of the Minor Occultation.

His entire adult life was spent watching the connection to the Imam grow thinner — from direct deputyship, to fewer letters, to silence.

He knew what was coming.

And he responded the only way a scholar can respond: he wrote.

The Crisis — Scattered Notebooks, Fading Voices

To understand what al-Kulayni did, you must first understand what he was trying to save.

For two centuries, the companions of the Imams — men like Zurara ibn A’yan, Muhammad ibn Muslim, Abu Basir, and hundreds of others whom we discussed in our previous session — had been recording what they heard from the Imams.

These personal notebooks were called the Usul Arba’umi’ah — the “Four Hundred Principles.”

They were not books in the modern sense.

They were handwritten records, individual scrolls, kept by individual companions and passed down through their families and students.

By Shaykh al-Kulayni’s time, these notebooks were scattered across Qum, Kufa, Baghdad, and Rey.

Some were in private collections.

Some were deteriorating.

Some were in the hands of families who did not fully understand their significance.

And the men who could verify them — the living links to the Imams — were dying, one generation after another.

Without compilation, this treasure would not survive.

Not because anyone would destroy it deliberately — but because time itself is a fire, and unorganised knowledge is kindling.

Twenty Years in Baghdad

Shaykh al-Kulayni’s response was Al-Kafi — a title that means

Not

Not

The Sufficient.

There is wisdom embedded in that name: he was not trying to record everything.

He was trying to record enough — enough for the community to function, to worship, to govern its affairs, to understand its theology, to maintain its identity — in the absence of a living, accessible Imam.

He spent twenty years compiling this work in Baghdad.

Twenty years of gathering, verifying, classifying, and organising over sixteen thousand narrations into a coherent structure.

The book is divided into three sections:

Usul al-Kafi, which deals with the foundations — theology, the nature of God, the proof of the Imamate, knowledge and ignorance, faith and disbelief;

Furu’ al-Kafi, which addresses practical law — prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, marriage, commerce, inheritance; and

Rawdat al-Kafi, a collection of miscellaneous narrations, letters, and speeches from the Imams.

In his introduction, Shaykh al-Kulayni preserved the request that set him on this journey — the words of an unnamed fellow believer who saw the community’s need and came to him with a plea:

وَقُلْتَ إِنَّكَ تُحِبُّ أَنْ يَكُونَ عِنْدَكَ كِتَابٌ كَافٍ يَجْمَعُ فِيهِ مِنْ جَمِيعِ فُنُونِ عِلْمِ الدِّينِ، مَا يَكْتَفِي بِهِ الْمُتَعَلِّمُ، وَيَرْجِعُ إِلَيْهِ الْمُسْتَرْشِدُ، وَيَأْخُذُ مِنْهُ مَنْ يُرِيدُ عِلْمَ الدِّينِ وَالْعَمَلَ بِهِ بِالْآثَارِ الصَّحِيحَةِ عَنِ الصَّادِقِينَ عَلَيْهِمُ السَّلَامُ، وَالسُّنَنِ الْقَائِمَةِ الَّتِي عَلَيْهَا الْعَمَلُ، وَبِهَا يُؤَدَّى فَرْضُ اللَّهِ عَزَّ وَجَلَّ وَسُنَّةُ نَبِيِّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَآلِهِ

“You said that you wished to have a sufficient book — one that gathers all the branches of the knowledge of religion: that which suffices the learner, that which the seeker of guidance may turn to, and from which the one who desires the knowledge of religion and wishes to act upon it may draw — through authentic narrations from the Truthful Ones (peace be upon them), and the established practices upon which action is based, and through which the obligations of God, Mighty and Majestic, and the Sunnah of His Prophet (blessings of God upon him and his family) are fulfilled.”

— Al-Kulayni, Muqaddimat al-Kafi (Introduction to Al-Kafi), Al-Kafi, Volume 1, Pages 8–9 (Tehran edition)

Listen to what is being asked for.

Not a book of theory.

Not a book for specialists.

A book that suffices the learner.

A book that the seeker of guidance may turn to.

A book from which an ordinary believer — far from Medina, far from the Imams, far from anyone who could answer his questions with certainty — could draw what he needed to fulfil his obligations to God and to the Prophet’s Sunnah.

This was not an academic commission.

This was a cry for help.

And Shaykh al-Kulayni heard it.

And when the work was done — twenty years later, sixteen thousand narrations later, a lifetime of verification and classification later — Shaykh al-Kulayni responded with words that carry both the humility of a servant and the resolve of a builder:

وَقَدْ يَسَّرَ اللَّهُ — وَلَهُ الْحَمْدُ — تَأْلِيفَ مَا سَأَلْتَ، وَأَرْجُو أَنْ يَكُونَ بِحَيْثُ تَوَخَّيْتَ. فَمَهْمَا كَانَ فِيهِ مِنْ تَقْصِيرٍ فَلَمْ تُقَصِّرْ نِيَّتُنَا فِي إِهْدَاءِ النَّصِيحَةِ، إِذْ كَانَتْ وَاجِبَةً لِإِخْوَانِنَا وَأَهْلِ مِلَّتِنَا

“God — and to Him belongs all praise — has facilitated the compilation of what you requested. I hope that it is as you had wished. And whatever shortcoming there may be in it, our intention in offering sincere counsel has not fallen short — for such counsel is an obligation to our brethren and the people of our faith.”

— Al-Kulayni, Muqaddimat al-Kafi (Introduction to Al-Kafi), Al-Kafi, Volume 1, Page 9 (Tehran edition)

This is a man who spent twenty years on a single book — and still presents it with the humility of one who knows that no human effort can fully capture what the Imams poured out.

He does not claim perfection.

He claims sincerity.

And he frames the entire enterprise not as personal achievement, but as obligation —

This is the voice of Shaykh al-Kulayni.

Not a scholar seeking fame.

A servant fulfilling a duty.

A man who heard a community crying out for guidance and spent the best years of his life answering that cry.

Scholarly Praise

The scholars who came after Shaykh al-Kulayni understood what he had done. Shaykh al-Mufid — whom we will meet in a future session — called Al-Kafi:

إِنَّ كِتَابَ الْكَافِي مِنْ أَجَلِّ كُتُبِ الشِّيعَةِ وَأَكْثَرِهَا فَائِدَةً

“The book Al-Kafi is among the most magnificent of the books of the Shi’a, and the most beneficial of them.”

— Shaykh al-Mufid; cited in biographical sources on al-Kulayni; see also Wiki Shia, entry on Al-Kafi, footnote 3

And Shaheed al-Awwal — the First Martyr, Muhammad ibn Makki, who himself would write one of the Hawza’s most enduring textbooks — Al-Luma’t ad-Dimishqiyyah — from a prison cell in Damascus — said of it:

كِتَابُ الْكَافِي فِي الْحَدِيثِ، الَّذِي لَمْ يُعْمَلْ لِلْإِمَامِيَّةِ مِثْلُهُ

“The book Al-Kafi in hadith — the like of which has not been produced for the Imamiyyah.”

— Shaheed al-Awwal (Muhammad ibn Makki al-Amili, d. 786 AH); cited in biographical sources on al-Kulayni

These are not casual endorsements.

These are the greatest minds of the tradition — a theologian and a martyr — testifying that what Shaykh al-Kulayni built was without precedent.

The Codification Race

And Shaykh al-Kulayni was not working in isolation.

Across the Muslim world, the same urgency was driving the same project.

Our brethren of the Sunnah were engaged in their own monumental effort to codify the prophetic tradition.

Sahih al-Bukhari had been completed a generation earlier, in 256 AH.

Sahih Muslim followed in 261 AH.

The collections of Abu Dawud, al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasa’i, and Ibn Majah were all compiled in the same century.

The entire ummah — Shi’a and Sunni alike — was racing against time, driven by the same fear: that what was not written would be lost.

But the Shi’a had an additional urgency that the Sunni compilers did not.

The Sunni tradition was losing its narrators — the human chains connecting them to the Prophet.

The Shi’a were losing something more: they were losing the Imam himself.

For a community whose entire theology, law, and spiritual life flowed from a living, divinely guided leader, the Occultation was not merely an inconvenience.

It was an existential crisis.

And Shaykh al-Kulayni knew — as perhaps no one else did — that the crisis demanded not merely a book, but a sufficient book.

One that could carry a community through an absence whose duration no one could predict.

The Providential Timing

And here is the detail that, once you hear it, you cannot unhear.

Shaykh al-Kulayni died in the year 329 after the Hijrah.

329 AH.

The very year that Ali ibn Muhammad al-Samarri — the Fourth and Final Deputy — received the Tawqi’ we heard tonight, the letter that announced the complete Occultation.

The very year the door closed.

Shaykh al-Kulayni finished his life’s work — and then he died — at the exact moment the community would need it most.

As if God timed his mission: compile the book, complete the book, and then depart — because the book must now do what the Deputy could no longer do — ensure that the voice of the Imams was never silenced, even when the Imam was hidden.

He was buried in Baghdad, at Bab al-Kufa — the Gate of Kufa — as if even in death he stood at the threshold between two cities, two eras, two worlds.

Lessons for Our Time

Three things we carry from Shaykh al-Kulayni tonight.

First: he did not wait for perfect conditions.

Baghdad under the Abbasids was not a safe place to be a Shi’a scholar compiling the words of the Imams.

The political environment was hostile.

The resources were limited.

The task was immense.

He did it anyway — for twenty years.

In our age, we have tools al-Kulayni could never have imagined: digital archives, printing presses, the internet, artificial intelligence.

The question is not whether we have the means to preserve and transmit knowledge.

The question is whether we have the will.

Second: the name “Al-Kafi” — “The Sufficient” — carries a lesson in itself.

He did not try to record everything.

He tried to record enough.

In an age of information overload, where we are drowning in content but starving for substance, the discipline of sufficiency — of knowing what is essential and organising it with care — is itself a form of wisdom.

Third: every builder has a window.

Al-Kulayni’s window was the Minor Occultation — seventy years in which the last living links to the Imams could still be traced, the last notebooks could still be gathered, the last narrators could still be questioned.

He used every year of that window.

And when the window closed, the book was ready.

The question for us is: what window are we in?

And what are we building before it closes?

Point 2: Shaykh al-Saduq — The Traveller Who Fought Doubt

A Child Born of a Prayer

Before we speak of the scholar, we must speak of how he came to exist — because the story of his birth is itself a proof.

His father was Ali ibn al-Husayn ibn Musa ibn Babawaih al-Qummi — a respected scholar in his own right, based in the city of Qum, the heartland of Shi’i learning in Iran.

Ali ibn Babawaih was a contemporary of the Minor Occultation — he lived through the era of the Deputies, and he had access to them.

And he had a request.

He wrote — through Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Ali al-Aswad — to the Third Deputy, Husayn ibn Ruh al-Nawbakhti, asking him to convey a petition to the Hidden Imam: pray for me, that God grant me a son.

The reply came back from the Imam:

قَدْ دَعَوْنَا اللَّهَ لَكَ بِذَلِكَ وَسَتُرْزَقُ وَلَدَيْنِ ذَكَرَيْنِ خَيِّرَيْنِ

“We have prayed to God for this on your behalf, and you shall be granted two blessed sons.”

— Recorded in Al-Saduq, Kamal al-Din wa Tamam al-Ni’mah; Al-Tusi, Al-Fihrist; Al-Najashi, Rijal al-Najashi; see also WikiShia, entry on al-Shaykh al-Saduq, citing these sources

Two sons were born: Abu Ja’far Muhammad — our Shaykh al-Saduq — and his brother Abu Abd Allah al-Husayn, who was also a scholar of hadith and jurisprudence.

And Shaykh al-Saduq himself — for his entire life — took pride in this origin.

His brother Husayn reported:

أَنَا وُلِدْتُ بِدُعَاءِ صَاحِبِ الْأَمْرِ وَيَفْتَخِرُ بِذَلِكَ

“I was born by the supplication of the Master of the Age” — and he used to take pride in this.

— Reported by his brother al-Husayn ibn Ali ibn Babawaih; cited in Al-Najashi, Rijal al-Najashi; Al-Tusi, Al-Fihrist; and biographical sources on al-Saduq