يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ كُونُواْ قَوَّـٰمِينَ لِلَّهِ شُهَدَآءَ بِٱلۡقِسۡطِۖ وَلَا يَجۡرِمَنَّكُمۡ شَنَـَٔانُ قَوۡمٍ عَلَىٰٓ أَلَّا تَعۡدِلُواْۚ ٱعۡدِلُواْ هُوَ أَقۡرَبُ لِلتَّقۡوَىٰۖ وَٱتَّقُواْ ٱللَّهَۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ خَبِيرُۢ بِمَا تَعۡمَلُونَ

“O you who believe: stand firm for God, as witnesses to justice; and do not let hatred of a people move you to be unjust. Be just — that is nearer to taqwa. And be mindful of God; God is aware of what you do.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Ma’idah (the Chapter of the Table Spread) #5, Verse 8

I want to begin with a verse that lets nobody in this room off.

Including me.

It is addressed to people who believe.

And it does not say:

Anybody can do that.

It says:

And then it tells you where justice sits.

Not a courtesy we extend to other people when we happen to feel generous.

A part of our own mindfulness of God.

Tonight that verse is going to be tested twice.

Once on what was done, in the name of a true word, to places this community loves.

And once on what resentment could do in this room — in us — while we listen to it.

I am going to hold both of those to the one measure.

Hold me to it.

Something Happened Between Malik and Now

Three weeks ago, from this chair, I said this to you:

“And I want to be very careful about how I say the next part, because there is an easy version of it that I am not going to give you.

The easy version names somebody.

It picks a movement, or a century, or a country, and it puts the blame there, and everybody in this room feels a little better for ten seconds and a little worse for a week.”

“We are not doing that. We have never done that here and we are not starting tonight.”

“Something happened between Malik and now.

And whatever it was, it did not happen in the books.”

“What we are dealing with today is not in those books.

It came from somewhere else.

And you do not have to know where it came from, or name it, or fight about it, to know that it is not what you were handed by the tradition.”

— from this majlis, three weeks ago: The Architecture of Guidance, Part 14, Is This Idol Worship?

All of that is still true.

A man can be quite certain a coin is counterfeit without ever having visited the workshop that struck it.

But some of you have been handed this charge at work, and at school, and by people you love.

And the question underneath it does not go away just because we refused to answer it badly.

So tonight we go and look at the workshop.

And the only way I know to do that, and keep the word I gave you three weeks ago, is to refuse the easy version on the way in.

No blame to make you feel better.

Nobody to boo.

I am going to read you their own pages — the movement’s own chroniclers, in their own words, with their page numbers — and where their pages say something in their favour, I am going to read that out too.

A history with the fair parts cut out is not a history.

It is an argument wearing a history’s clothes.

And it is fair to look now, because of what we did last week.

Last week we went into our own house first.

We heard an Imam of our own describe the excesses of our own people in harder words than anybody outside has ever used about us.

We did that first, on purpose.

A community that has not looked at itself has no business looking at anybody else.

One more thing, before anything else is told, because it is the rule of the whole evening.

That is our way.

It has always been our way in this majlis.

And if anything I say tonight sounds to you like a stick, then I have said it badly — and the fault is mine, not the history’s.

A Word of Truth

Let me put the case against us first, at its full strength, in one sentence, before I answer anything:

That last clause leans on a real report — a report every school of Islam reads, and one we read here in full three weeks ago:

قَالَ لِي عَلِيُّ بْنُ أَبِي طَالِبٍ: أَلَا أَبْعَثُكَ عَلَىٰ مَا بَعَثَنِي عَلَيْهِ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ: أَنْ لَا تَدَعَ تِمْثَالًا إِلَّا طَمَسْتَهُ، وَلَا قَبْرًا مُشْرِفًا إِلَّا سَوَّيْتَهُ

“Ali ibn Abi Talib said to me: shall I not send you on the same errand that the Messenger of God, may God’s blessings be upon him, sent me on? That you leave no image without effacing it, and no raised grave without levelling it.”

— Abu al-Hayyaj al-Asadi; Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, Sahih Muslim, the Book of Funerals — set in full in this majlis in Session 74

Three weeks ago we answered the charge itself, and I am not going to argue it again.

Tonight’s answer is a different one, and it begins in our own house.

An Imam of Our Own House

Begin where last week ended.

Imam Ali ibn Musa al-Rida, peace and blessings be upon him, the eighth of the Imams, was asked about people of our own who made claims for him and for his fathers that they had no right to make.

You heard his answer last week, and I want you to hear it again:

الْغُلاةُ كُفَّارٌ وَالْمُفَوِّضَةُ مُشْرِكُونَ

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

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

Disbelievers.

Associators.

Those are the very words thrown at this community from a thousand pulpits — and here they are in our own Imam’s mouth, about our own people.

And notice whom they are aimed at.

Not at people who visit graves.

At people who claimed too much for the Household.

That is a limit, and it was given to us by the Household itself.

The Premise We Share

And the principle under it, in the words of the commentator this majlis returns to almost every week — Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, the author of al-Mizan — on two verses of Surah Al Imran:

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

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

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

Even intercession — he names it.

That is our commentator, not theirs.

So let me be exact about what we share and what we do not.

We share the premise:

What we do not share is the step that says asking the righteous to pray for you is that worship.

That argument we had three weeks ago.

Tonight’s question is not:

It is:

Our Own Book on the Prophet’s Grave

And before I open anybody else’s book, I want to open ours — on the very report that matters most.

Shaykh al-Saduq, one of the great gatherers of our tradition, about a thousand years ago, in Man La Yahduruhu al-Faqih — one of our four great collections — records the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions:

وَقَالَ اَلنَّبِيُّ صَلَّى اَللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَ آلِهِ: «لاَ تَتَّخِذُوا قَبْرِي قِبْلَةً وَ لاَ مَسْجِداً فَإِنَّ اَللَّهَ عَزَّ وَ جَلَّ لَعَنَ اَلْيَهُودَ حِينَ اِتَّخَذُوا قُبُورَ أَنْبِيَائِهِمْ مَسَاجِدَ.

“Do not take my grave as a qibla, nor as a mosque; for God, Mighty and Majestic, made His mercy distant from the Jews when they took the graves of their prophets as mosques.”

— the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions; Shaykh al-Saduq, Man La Yahduruhu al-Faqih, Volume 1, hadith 532

And immediately beside it, in the same book, an Imam answering a man who asked him about exactly this:

وَ سَأَلَهُ سَمَاعَةُ بْنُ مِهْرَانَ: عَنْ زِيَارَةِ اَلْقُبُورِ وَ بِنَاءِ اَلْمَسَاجِدِ فِيهَا فَقَالَ «أَمَّا زِيَارَةُ اَلْقُبُورِ فَلاَ بَأْسَ بِهَا وَ لاَ يُبْنَى عِنْدَهَا مَسَاجِدُ.

“And Sama’a ibn Mihran asked him about visiting graves and building mosques at them, and he said: as for visiting graves, there is no harm in it; and mosques are not to be built beside them.”

— Shaykh al-Saduq, Man La Yahduruhu al-Faqih, Volume 1, hadith 531

So the warning about the Prophet’s grave is in our books too.

We have not hidden it and we do not explain it away.

We hold it.

And our scholars have held it beside something else.

There is no harm in the visit — the Imam has just said so.

Prayer in a graveyard is disliked, but only in the sense of a lesser reward.

And where the one buried there is a blessing from God, as the shrines are, the place takes the ruling of a mosque: the shrines of the Household, like the mosques, are among houses God has permitted to be raised — and prayer in them is not disliked at all.

It is recommended. In our own time Ayatollah Jawadi Amoli, may God protect him, has set that out in his commentary on the Qur’an, from the author of Jawahir al-Kalam.

مطلب بعدي آن است كه اين جريان كه گفته شد ﴿لَنَتَّخِذَنَ عَلَيْهِم مَّسْجِداً﴾ اين در تفسير مراغي و امثال مراغي اين حرف هست چندتا روايت اينها نقل كردند كه شما قبور را مسجد قرار ندهيد البته در فقه ما اماميه هم هست كه نماز در قبرستان مكروه است اين كراهتها هم به معني «أقلّ ثواباً» هست نه آن حضاضتي كه در كراهتهاي ديگر است ولي اگر آن مقبور و آن قبر بركتِ الهي باشد نظير حرمها, حُكم مسجد را خدا غريق رحمت كند مرحوم صاحب جواهر را ايشان در بحث مكان مصلّي دارد بالأخره اين ذوات قدسي كه خليفهٴ الهي‌اند اسامي اينها ملحق به اسامي مبارك ذات اقدس الهي شد و خانهٴ اينها, قبر اينها ملحق به خانهٴ الهي يعني مسجد شد هم مساجد جزء ﴿فِي بُيُوتٍ أَذِنَ اللَّهُ أَن تُرْفَعَ﴾ (سورهٴ نور, آيهٴ 36) هستند, هم حرمهاي اهل بيت(عليهم السلام) جزء ﴿فِي بُيُوتٍ أَذِنَ اللَّهُ أَن تُرْفَعَ﴾ هستند آن‌وقت ثوابهايي كه براي نماز در حرم هست ايشان مي‌شمارند كه معادل با كدام مسجد است ثواب نماز در حرم كدام شخصيّت معادل با ثواب نماز كدام مسجد است؟ اين را ايشان هم ذكر كردند خب اينها مستثناي‌اند براي اينكه جزء ﴿فِي بُيُوتٍ أَذِنَ اللَّهُ أَن تُرْفَعَ﴾ هستند اينها نه تنها مكروه نيست بلكه مستحب است و فضايل فراواني دارد.

“The next point: on this episode, where it was said, ‘we will surely take a place of worship over them’ — this is in the commentary of al-Maraghi and works like it: they have related a number of reports that you should not make graves into mosques.

Of course, in our Imami jurisprudence too, prayer in a graveyard is disliked; and these dislikes mean ‘of lesser reward’, not the lowliness found in other dislikes. But if the one buried there, and that grave, is a blessing from God, like the shrines, then the ruling of a mosque — may God immerse the late author of Jawahir in His mercy, he has this in his discussion of the place of the one who prays.

After all, these holy beings, who are the vicegerents of God — their names were joined to the blessed names of the Most Holy Essence of God, and their house, their grave, was joined to the house of God, that is, the mosque.

The mosques are among ‘in houses God has permitted to be raised’ (Surah al-Nur, verse 36), and the shrines of the Household, peace be upon them, are among ‘in houses God has permitted to be raised’. And then the rewards for prayer in a shrine — he counts them up, and which mosque each one equals: the reward of prayer at whose shrine equals the reward of prayer in which mosque?

He has set this out as well.

So these are excepted, because they are among ‘in houses God has permitted to be raised’: not only are they not disliked — they are recommended, and they have many merits.”

— Ayatollah Jawadi Amoli, Tasnim, lesson on Surah al-Kahf (7 February 2009), my translation; the verse reference in brackets is the lesson’s own footnote

So the quarrel is not over the report.

We hold it as firmly as anybody.

Then Their Book

In the eighteenth century, in Najd — the high plateau in the middle of Arabia, the country around what is now Riyadh — a Hanbali scholar named Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab wrote a short work called Kitab al-Tawhid, the Book of the Oneness of God.

Those of you who were here for Session 62 have met him.

I will name him once tonight, and then not again.

One of its chapters carries this title:

Under it he brings the Prophet’s prayer that his own grave should not become an idol that is worshipped, and the report that God’s anger was severe on a people who took the graves of their prophets as places of worship.

Now listen carefully, because this is where the evening turns.

We hold that report too.

We have just read it, in our own book, before we read it in his.

So the principle is shared.

The quarrel is over what it forbids — and over what was done with it.

A word about the name, said once and then put away.

The people who followed him called themselves the people of tawhid, the people of the oneness of God.

The name most of you know — Wahhabi — was given to them by their opponents, after the man.

From here on I will simply say:

Where the Pattern Was Born

To understand what can be done with a true word, I want to take you back to Siffin.

Not because anybody tonight descends from anybody at Siffin.

Nobody does.

But because Siffin is where this pattern was first laid down, in front of the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him — and he saw it, and he named it.

At Siffin, as the battle turned, the copies of the Qur’an were raised.

And men in his own army said:

Afterwards he went out to their camp and reminded them of it:

ثُمَّ كَلَّمَهُمْ (عليه السلام) بِكَلاَم طَوِيل، مِنْ جُمْلَتِهِ أَنْ قَالَ: أَلَمْ تَقُولُوا عِنْدَ رَفْعِهِمُ الْمَصَاحِفَ ـ حِيلَةً وَغِيلَةً وَمَكْراً وَخَدِيعَةً ـ : إِخْوانُنَا وَأَهْلُ دَعْوَتِنَا، اسْتَقَالُونَا وَاسْتَرَاحُوا إِلى كِتَابِ اللهِ سُبْحَانَهُ، فَالرَّأْيُ الْقَبُولُ مِنْهُمْ وَالتَّنْفِيسُ عَنْهُمْ؟

“Then he spoke to them at length, and among what he said was: Did you not say, when they raised the copies of the Qur’an — as a trick and a treachery, a ruse and a deception — ‘Our brothers, the people of our own call, have asked us to let them off, and have taken refuge in the Book of God, glory be to Him; the right view is to accept it from them and give them relief’?”

— Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him; Nahj al-Balagha, Sermon 122

A trick, a treachery, a ruse, a deception.

Four words for one act.

The Book was raised to stop a battle, not to be obeyed.

Then came the arbitration — and the same men who had demanded it now called it unbelief. And he answered them:

إِنَّا لَمْ نُحَكِّمِ الرِّجَالَ، وَإِنَّمَا حَكَّمْنَا الْقُرْآنَ. وهذَا الْقُرْآنُ إِنَّمَا هُوَ خَطٌّ مَسْتُورٌ بَيْنَ الدَّفَّتَيْنِ، لاَ يَنْطِقُ بِلِسَان، وَلاَ بُدَّ لَهُ مِنْ تَرْجُمَان، وَإِنَّمَا يَنْطِقُ عَنْهُ الرِّجَالُ.

“We did not make men the judges; we made the Qur’an the judge. And this Qur’an is only lines written, hidden between two covers; it does not speak with a tongue; it must have an interpreter; and it is men who speak for it.”

— Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him; Nahj al-Balagha, Sermon 125

Hold on to that second sentence.

A text does not walk into a room by itself.

Somebody carries it in.

And somebody decides what it is being asked to do.

And then these same men took a sentence from the Qur’an —

— and made it their slogan against him.

And he gave them an answer of five words in Arabic.

It is the key to everything we will do tonight:

وَقَالَ (عليه ‏السلام) لَمَّا سَمِعَ قَوْلَ الْخَوَارِجِ ـ لَا حُكْمَ إِلَّا لِلهِ ـ : كَلِمَةُ حَقٍّ يُرَادُ بِهَا بَاطِلٌ.

“When he heard the Khawarij say ‘No rule but God’s’, he said: a word of truth by which falsehood is intended.”

— Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him; Nahj al-Balagha, Saying 198

A word of truth.

Not a lie — a truth.

Every word of their slogan was true.

The falsehood was in what it was being used for.

And notice what he tests.

He tests the use.

He does not tell us what was in their hearts.

Neither will I.

What We Carry Forward

Tonight is Wednesday, the 25th of Rabi al-Thani, 1448 — the 7th of October, 2026.

This is the seventeenth part of The Architecture of Guidance, and the ninth of eleven sessions in the part of it we have called The House Beside the Grave.

Three weeks ago we took the charge you have all heard — that to visit a grave is to worship the dead — and we traced it to its source.

And we found that the argument was never really about the oneness of God at all.

The great scholars who disagreed about graves disagreed the way scholars disagree: in books, with evidence, in front of everybody, without either of them ever suggesting that the other had left the religion.

Two weeks ago we went into other people’s houses and read their books.

And we found that every serious tradition attached a limit to the honouring of the dead — and that every system God has given us can be corrupted by the people who carry it.

And last week we asked the hardest version of that question, about ourselves.

Can it become that — here?

And our own house answered first: yes, it can.

It said so in harder words than anybody outside has ever used about us.

And it showed us where the line runs:

So tonight has three movements.

First, how a true word was put to work — a preacher, an emir, and a bargain.

Second, what was done with it, in the words of their own historian.

And third, the second levelling of al-Baqi’, and what is still being levelled now.

We have looked at ourselves first.

So now we can look at somebody else without it becoming a scoreboard.

A Preacher, an Emir, and a Bargain

The Place

Start with the place, because you cannot follow what happened without it.

Najd is the high, dry interior of Arabia.

In the eighteenth century it was a patchwork of small towns, each with its own ruler, each watching the next.

One of those towns was al-Dir’iyya.

Madawi al-Rasheed, a historian of Arabia, in a history published by Cambridge University Press, describes it in one sentence:

“In the eighteenth century Dirʿiyyah was a small settlement in Najd with a mixed population of farmers, merchants, artisans, minor ʿulama and slaves.”

— Madawi al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, second edition (Cambridge University Press, 2010), page 14

By one source, it had not more than seventy households.

It had its own emir, ruling since 1727.

Today it sits on the edge of Riyadh.

Keep the size of it in your mind.

What follows did not begin in an empire.

It began in a village.

A Book, Then a Pickaxe

His life, in brief.

He lived from 1115 of the hijra to 1206 — the eighteenth century, in the calendar most of us live by.

١١١٥-١٢٠٦ه

“1115–1206 AH.”

— Kashf al-Shubuhat, the title page of the 1419 AH printing

He was born at al-Uyayna, into a family of judges and jurists; his father was the judge of the town.

As a young man, by his own chroniclers’ account, he went on pilgrimage to Mecca, spent time in Medina, and travelled to Basra, before coming home to Najd.

“Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s father was the leading cleric of the town, dispensing justice as Islamic judge (qadi) and giving opinions (fatwas) on matters of religious law or ritual in his capacity as mufti, while his mother was the daughter of another cleric.”

“The Wahhabi chroniclers offer a duller, more credible itinerary. They have Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab performing the pilgrimage to Mecca as a teenager, spending time then or later in the Prophet’s city of Medina. He then traveled to the ethnically and religiously mixed town of Basra before returning home to Najd, via the religious center of al-Ahsa on the Gulf coast (Ibn Ghannam, 1949, 1:26–8; Ibn Bishr, 1982–3, 1:35–7).”

— the family and the travels: Michael Crawford, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (Oneworld, 2014), chapter 2

And at a town called Huraymila he wrote the book we have just opened, Kitab al-Tawhid.

The movement’s own first chronicler records it there.

فأقام رحمه الله تعالى، وأفاض عليه بره ووالى، في بلد حُرَيملَا سنين ينشر أعلام التوحيد، ويبدي في المحافل الدر النضيد، وجوهر الحق الفريد، وصنف في تلك الإقامة كتاب «التوحيد» ونشر أعلامه.

“So he stayed — God the Exalted have mercy on him, and pour His goodness on him without end — in the town of Huraymila for years, spreading the banners of the oneness of God, and setting out in the gatherings strung pearls and the matchless jewel of truth; and during that stay he composed the book al-Tawhid, and spread its banners.”

— Husayn ibn Ghannam, Rawdat al-Afkar wa’l-Afham (Tarikh Najd), ed. al-Kharashi, page 215

I want you to hold the order of what happens next, because the order is the point.

First a book.

Then a pickaxe.

Then a bargain.

At al-Uyayna — the town of his birth — there were graves of Companions of the Prophet at a place called al-Jubayla, with domes built over them.

And here I am going to let the movement’s own first chronicler tell it, because I promised you their pages.

He calls the domes idols.

He records that the preacher and the emir of al-Uyayna went out to them with pickaxes — all of them, in his words, hoping for the reward — and that the graves were levelled according to the prescribed way.

A later chronicler of the movement, Ibn Bishr, adds that the preacher did it with his own hand, because the men with him shrank from pulling it down.

ولكن لم يصبر على الإقامة بذلك المكان، مع مشاهدته فيه الأوثان، فعند ذلك أمر الشيخ محمدٌ الأميرَ عثمان، بهدم القُبَب والمساجد المبنية في الجبيلة على قبور الصحابة، وقطع الأشجار التي كانت الخلق لها في كل ساعة منتابة، فبادر عثمان لذلك وامتثل، وخرج الشيخ معه وجماعتهم على عجل، وخرجوا بالمعاول، والكل للأجر آمل، فهدموا تلك المساجد، وأزالوا رفيع المشاهد، وأزالوا جميع المحظور، عن جميع تلك القبور، وعُدِّلَت على السَّنَن المشروع،

“But he could not bear to stay in that place while he saw idols in it. So at that the Shaykh Muhammad commanded the emir Uthman to demolish the domes and the mosques built at al-Jubayla over the graves of the Companions, and to cut down the trees that people resorted to at every hour. Uthman hastened to it and obeyed, and the Shaykh went out with him, and their company, in haste; and they went out with pickaxes, every one of them hoping for the reward. And they demolished those mosques, and removed the lofty shrines, and removed everything forbidden from all those graves; and they were levelled according to the prescribed way.”

— Husayn ibn Ghannam, Rawdat al-Afkar wa’l-Afham, ed. al-Kharashi, pages 215–216

فهدم فيها الشيخ بيده لما تهيّب هدمها الذين معه، فانتظر جهلة أهل البلد ما يحدث على الشيخ بسبب هدمها، فأصبح في أحسن حال.

“So the Shaykh demolished it with his own hand, because those with him shrank from demolishing it; and the ignorant among the people of the town waited for what would befall the Shaykh for demolishing it — and he rose in the best of states.”

— Uthman ibn Bishr, ʿUnwan al-Majd fi Tarikh Najd, Volume 1, page 39

The same first chronicler preserves the charge that was later made against them, and the answer given in the preacher’s name.

The charge was that they had demolished the graves of the Companions who fell at al-Jubayla, and scattered their remains, and pulled down a mosque there.

The answer accepts the demolition: what was pulled down, it says, was the building over the grave they claim is Zayd’s, and the mosque in the cemetery — following what God and His Messenger commanded of levelling graves.

And it denies the rest: the scattering of the remains.

That, it says, is false.

فلأجل ذلك هَدَم الشيخُ ذلك البناء الذي على قبره، وذلك المسجدَ المبنيَّ على المقبرة، اتباعًا لما أمر الله به ورسوله مِن تسوية القبور، والنهيِ الغليظِ الشديد في بناء المساجد عليها، كما يَعرف ذلك من له أدنى مَلَكَة من المعرفة والعلم.

“So for that reason the Shaykh demolished that building over his grave, and that mosque built over the cemetery — following what God and His Messenger commanded of levelling graves, and the severe, stern prohibition of building mosques over them — as anyone with the least grasp of knowledge and learning knows.”

— Husayn ibn Ghannam, Rawdat al-Afkar wa’l-Afham, ed. al-Kharashi, page 363; the charge (page 362) and the denial (page 363) narrated

I am reading you the denial because it is on the same page, and because a history that leaves out the defendant’s answer is not a history.

So that was the first major demolition of the movement — told by the movement, with its reason, in its own words.

Not the first demolition of anything in the history of Islam; the first major one of this movement.

And I cannot give you a year for it with any confidence.

What the pages allow me to say is this: it was at al-Uyayna, and it was before the agreement I am about to describe.

Now — in his Kitab al-Tawhid, the preacher wrote a line about us.

He wrote that the people of our school were the first to build mosques over graves.

He uses a name for us in that passage that I am not going to repeat in this room.

And a historian of the movement, David Commins, puts the charge plainly: he blamed us for bringing into Islam the practice of building mosques at graves.

I want to answer that.

And I want to answer it with the Qur’an, not with anger.

There is a chapter of the Qur’an named after a group of young believers who fled a tyrant and slept in a cave.

When they were found, the people of the town argued about what to do over them.

And the Qur’an reports how the argument ended:

وَكَذَٰلِكَ أَعۡثَرۡنَا عَلَيۡهِمۡ لِيَعۡلَمُوٓاْ أَنَّ وَعۡدَ ٱللَّهِ حَقّٞ وَأَنَّ ٱلسَّاعَةَ لَا رَيۡبَ فِيهَآ إِذۡ يَتَنَٰزَعُونَ بَيۡنَهُمۡ أَمۡرَهُمۡۖ فَقَالُواْ ٱبۡنُواْ عَلَيۡهِم بُنۡيَٰنٗاۖ رَّبُّهُمۡ أَعۡلَمُ بِهِمۡۚ قَالَ ٱلَّذِينَ غَلَبُواْ عَلَىٰٓ أَمۡرِهِمۡ لَنَتَّخِذَنَّ عَلَيۡهِم مَّسۡجِدٗا

“And thus did We make them known, so that people might know that the promise of God is true, and that of the Hour there is no doubt — when they were disputing among themselves about their affair. And they said: build over them a building; their Lord knows best about them. Those who prevailed over their affair said: we will surely take a place of worship over them.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Kahf (the Chapter of the Cave) #18, Verse 21

Allamah Tabataba’i reads that verse closely.

There were two parties.

One wanted only to put up a building over them, wall them in, and leave them.

The other — the ones who prevailed — said: we will take a place of worship over them.

And he says the ones who prevailed were the monotheists: that a place of worship there would be a place where God is worshipped, and by its lasting, the memory of those young believers would last.

And Ayatollah Jawadi Amoli, may God protect him, adds what you have just heard for yourselves: had that been a false saying, the Qur’an would surely have refuted it.

It did not.

فمعنى الجملة أعني قوله:«ربهم أعلم بهم»يتفاوت بالنظر إلى الوجهين المتقدمين في قوله:«إذ يتنازعون بينهم أمرهم»إذ للجملة على أي حال نوع تفرع على تنازع بينهم كما عرفت آنفا فإن كان التنازع المدلول عليه بقوله:«إذ يتنازعون بينهم أمرهم»هو التنازع في أمر البعث بالإقرار و الإنكار لكون ضمير«أمرهم»للناس كان المعنى أنهم تنازعوا في أمر البعث فأعثرناهم عليهم ليعلموا أن وعد الله حق و أن الساعة لا ريب فيها لكن المشركين لم ينتهوا بما ظهرت لهم من الآية فقالوا ابنوا على أصحاب الكهف بنيانا و اتركوهم على حالهم ينقطع عنهم الناس فلم يظهر لنا من أمرهم شيء و لم نظفر فيهم على يقين ربهم أعلم بهم، و قال الموحدون أمرهم ظاهر و آيتهم بينة و لنتخذن عليهم مسجدا يعبد فيه الله و يبقى ببقائه ذكرهم.

“So the meaning of the sentence — I mean His saying, ‘their Lord knows best about them’ — differs according to the two readings already given of His saying, ‘when they were disputing among themselves about their affair’; for in either case the sentence branches from a dispute among them, as you have just seen. If the dispute meant by His saying, ‘when they were disputing among themselves about their affair’, is the dispute over the resurrection, affirming it and denying it — the pronoun in ‘their affair’ referring to the people — then the meaning is: they disputed over the resurrection, so We led them to come upon them, that they might know that the promise of God is true and that there is no doubt about the Hour; but the polytheists did not desist at the sign that had appeared to them, and said: build over the Companions of the Cave a building, and leave them as they are, so that the people are cut off from them — nothing of their affair has become clear to us, and we have arrived at no certainty about them; their Lord knows best about them. And the monotheists said: their affair is clear, and their sign is evident, and we will surely take over them a place of worship, in which God is worshipped, and by whose lasting their memory lasts.”

و قوله:«قال الذين غلبوا على أمرهم لنتخذن عليهم مسجدا»هؤلاء القائلون هم الموحدون و من الشاهد عليه التعبير عما اتخذوه بالمسجد دون المعبد فإن المسجد في عرف القرآن هو المحل المتخذ لذكر الله و السجود له قال تعالى:«و مساجد يذكر فيها اسم الله»: الحج: 40.

“And His saying, ‘Those who prevailed over their affair said: we will surely take a place of worship over them’: those who said it are the monotheists. And among the evidence for this is that what they took is named a masjid, not a temple; for the masjid, in the usage of the Qur’an, is the place taken for the remembrance of God and for prostration to Him. He, the Exalted, has said: ‘and mosques in which the name of God is remembered’ (al-Hajj: 40).”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Kahf #18, Verses 9 to 26

اين ﴿لَنَتَّخِذَنَ عَلَيْهِم مَّسْجِداً﴾ اگر يك سخن باطلي بود قرآن يقيناً ابطال مي‌كرد.

“This — ‘we will surely take a place of worship over them’ — had it been a false saying, the Qur’an would certainly have refuted it.”

— Ayatollah Jawadi Amoli, Tasnim, lesson on Surah al-Kahf (7 February 2009), my translation

So the claim that we were the first to put a place of worship beside the resting place of the righteous is not answered by our pride.

It is answered by the Qur’an, which reports believers doing exactly that — and does not correct them.

I am not going to say anything about who was first, or how many centuries before anybody.

I do not need to.

The Qur’an got there before all of us.

The Bargain at al-Dir’iyya

From al-Uyayna the preacher came to al-Dir’iyya, and to its emir.

And here I have to be more careful than anywhere else tonight, because this is the moment everybody thinks they already know.

The movement has two great chroniclers, and they do not tell this the same way.

The first — the one who lived in the preacher’s own time — records protection, and a covenant, and nothing more.

The second, Ibn Bishr, the later chronicler, records more.

I am going to give you his version, and I am going to give it to you as his, because it is his.

In Ibn Bishr’s account, the preacher set the word of the oneness of God before the emir as the road to rule.

And the emir had a condition.

He took from the people of al-Dir’iyya the kind of levy the rulers of the towns took from their subjects, and he asked that it be left alone.

And the preacher agreed.

Now I am going to give you the chronicler’s exact turn, because a summary of it once dropped the end, and the end matters.

The preacher agreed,

And, says the chronicler, so it was.

إلا أن محمد بن سعود شرط في مبايعته للشيخ أن لا يتعرضه فيما يأخذه من أهل الدرعية مثل الذي كان .. يأخذه رؤساء البلدان على رعاياهم ، فأجابه الشيخ على ذلك رجاء أن يخلف الله عليه من الغنيمة أكثر من ذلك ، فيتركه رغبة فيما عند الله سبحانه. فكان الأمر كذلك ووسع الله عليهم في أسرع ما يكون

“Except that Muhammad ibn Saud made it a condition of his pledge to the Shaykh that he would not interfere with what he took from the people of al-Dir’iyya, the like of what the rulers of the towns used to take from their subjects. The Shaykh agreed to that, hoping that God would recompense him from the spoils with more than that, so that he would give it up out of desire for what is with God, glory be to Him. And so it was: God gave them plenty, as quickly as could be.”

— Uthman ibn Bishr, ʿUnwan al-Majd fi Tarikh Najd, Volume 1, pages 42–43

فلما سمع بذلك الأمير محمد بن سعود أسكنه الله دار الخلود ، قام من فوره مسرعا إليه ومعه إخوته ثنيان ومشاري ، فأتاه في بيت أحمد بن سويلم فسلم عليه وبادره بالقبول والتقبيل ، وأبدى له غاية الإكرام والتبجيل ، وأخبره أنه يمنعه بما يمنع به نساءه وأولاده من جميع من عاداه وكاده ، إلا أنه طلب من الشيخ رحمه الله العهد والميثاق أن لا يرحل عن بلده إلى سائر الآفاق ،

“And when the emir Muhammad ibn Saud — God settle him in the abode of eternity — heard of it, he rose at once and hurried to him, with his brothers Thunayyan and Mishari, and came to him in the house of Ahmad ibn Suwaylim. He greeted him, and was quick to receive him and to kiss him, and showed him the utmost honour and reverence, and told him that he would protect him as he protected his own women and children from all who showed him enmity or plotted against him — except that he asked of the Shaykh, God have mercy on him, a covenant and pledge that he would not leave his town for other lands.”

— the first chronicler, for the protection and the covenant alone: Husayn ibn Ghannam, Rawdat al-Afkar wa’l-Afham (1949 edition), part 2, page 3

Listen to both halves of that.

The preacher’s hope, as the chronicler tells it, was that the emir would one day give up his levy for God’s sake.

That is a pious hope, and I am not going to take it away from him.

And the means by which it was expected to come about was the spoils of war.

The historians who have studied it tell the exchange the same way — booty in place of the tax.

Madawi al-Rasheed has the preacher promise wealth, in the form of zakat and expansion under his religious guidance.

And one of them, Michael Crawford, calls the single dramatic meeting a later legend, shaped by the times of the man who wrote it down.

I give you that as well.

The year was around 1744, or the year after.

I will not be more precise than the page allows.

“The reformer agreed to the first condition, but as for the second, he replied that God might compensate the amir with booty and legitimate taxes greater than the taxes on harvests.”

— David Commins, The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), page 19

“More specifically, Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab promised him wealth, in the form of zakat and expansion under his religious guidance.”

— Madawi al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, page 17

“We may infer that the bond between shaykh and ruler developed more slowly and less dramatically than Ibn Bishr described, and was only later embodied in the legend of one decisive, resonant encounter.”

— Michael Crawford, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (Oneworld, 2014), chapter 3

Now let me put the test from Siffin to it — quietly, without raising my voice.

A word of truth: the oneness of God.

Nobody in this room disputes it.

Everybody in this room would die for it.

And what was it put to work for?

The Family That Carried It

This is where I owe you an introduction, because the family of that emir is part of this story for the next two centuries, and I want you to meet it properly — as history — before we watch it act.

The family is the Al Saud.

Its origins: an oasis family, with no great tribal confederation behind it and no great wealth.

Madawi al-Rasheed dates the change in its fortunes to the moment it took up the movement.

Its religious orientation, in this period, is the agreement you have just heard.

The historians date it to 1744.

Its stance towards the graves — and so towards the shrines of the Household — she gives in one sentence:

“According to Wahhabi teachings, graves should remain unmarked to discourage later visits and veneration by Muslims.”

— Madawi al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, page 20

Its impact on our own community, in its own century — one sentence, and only history.

She records that the Shi’a of al-Hasa, in the east of the peninsula, suffered repression throughout the eighteenth century at the movement’s hands, and that it counted them the very type of the people of innovation.

And the shape of the family’s rule is three states.

The first, beginning in 1744, ended by force at al-Dir’iyya itself, on the 11th of September 1818.

The second rose in 1824 and fell in 1891.

The third began when the family took Riyadh in 1902, and became the kingdom proclaimed in 1932.

“The fortunes of the Al Saʿud began to change with their adoption of the Wahhabi movement, associated with the reformer Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab (1703–92).”

“The majority of the peasantry consisted of Shiʿa Muslims, a minority among a Sunni majority. They had suffered repression throughout the eighteenth century at the hands of the Wahhabis, who regarded them as the epitome of ahl al-bidaʿ (al-Ḥasan 1994; Doughty 1979; Wallin 1854).”

“The Saʿudis surrendered on 11 September 1818 after the total destruction of their capital and its fortifications.”

— Madawi al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia: the family’s fortunes, page 15; al-Hasa, page 33; the end of the first state, page 22; the three states, pages 14–17, 20, 22, 25, 33, 38, 68

I am telling you the end of the first state here, and only here: it ended by force, in the place where it began.

And let me say plainly what I am doing and what I am not.

I am introducing the history of a ruling family.

I am not talking about anybody alive.

And I am not talking about a people.

A family is not a people, a dynasty is not the Sunni world, and the movement is not the religion.

The Story We Tell, and Why I Will Not Tell It

There is a story that our own community tells about where all of this came from.

Many of you have heard it.

Some of you were given it as fact.

It is the memoir of a British spy, who is supposed to have found the preacher as a young man, flattered him, and shaped him.

It is a forgery.

Hamid Algar, in a critical study of this movement published in 2002, sets out the marks of forgery in a long note.

They are simple ones.

The memoir exists only in Arabic, said to be translated by a doctor known only by his initials; the one English version was translated from the Arabic.

Its Englishman keeps his dates by the Hijri calendar.

And he speaks of nationalism, and of birth control, long before anybody spoke of either.

Algar is no friend of the movement.

And he says something else that I want you to hear.

He wishes the answering of the movement had been left to scholars — and as his example, he names Shaykh Ja’far Kashif al-Ghita’ of Najaf.

“‘Mr. Hempher’, it seems, so thoroughly assimilated his role as undercover agent that he used the Hijri calendar in preference to the Christian.”

“He would have done better to leave the task of refuting Wahhabism to scholars such as Shaykh Ja‘far Kashif al-Ghita’, from whose treatise an extract is included at the end of this essay.”

— Hamid Algar, Wahhabism: A Critical Essay (Oneonta, NY: Islamic Publications International, 2002), note 30, pages 38–39

So I will not tell that story.

We do not need a spy.

We do not need a villain from outside to explain what happened inside.

The true story is enough.

And a community that tells stories it cannot prove, about people it does not like, has lost the right to complain when stories are told about it.

Lessons for Our Time

Lesson One — Test the Use, Not the Slogan. And Never the Heart.

Go back to the five words from Siffin.

That is the test, and I want you to notice how narrow it is.

It judges the use a word is put to.

It does not judge the word — the word was true.

And it does not judge the heart of the man who said it.

What was in a man’s heart is God’s to know, and we said last week that it is not ours.

And it cuts our way too.

A slogan of ours — a chant, a banner, a verse on a wall — is tested in exactly the same way.

A true word, put to the wrong work, is no safer in our mouths than in anybody else’s.

Now, where does this kind of going wrong come from?

The Qur’an tells us where the danger sits.

When Iblis — Satan — was cast out, he said to God:

قَالَ فَبِمَآ أَغۡوَيۡتَنِي لَأَقۡعُدَنَّ لَهُمۡ صِرَٰطَكَ ٱلۡمُسۡتَقِيمَ

“He said: Because You have led me astray, I will surely sit in wait for them on Your straight path.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-A’raf (the Chapter of the Heights) #7, Verse 16

Not on the side roads.

The one who is already on a side road needs no attention at all.

The enemy sits on the main road — where the people of real devotion are walking — and he confuses, and he manipulates, and he misleads the ones who are on it.

Which means two things at once.

Going wrong in this way is no insult to anybody’s sincerity.

And sincerity, on its own, is no protection.

And you have already heard tonight how it is done.

A true text is read in part, and made to speak on its own — when the Commander of the Faithful has already told us that the Qur’an does not speak by itself, and that it is men who speak for it.

And then a group becomes sure that it alone is right.

That last step is the most dangerous one of all.

And the Commander of the Faithful drew the line himself — about the Khawarij, the very men who had raised that slogan against him:

لاَ تَقْتُلُوا الْخَوَارِجَ بَعْدِي، فَلَيْسَ مَنْ طَلَبَ الْحَقَّ فَأَخْطَأَهُ، كَمَنْ طَلَبَ الْبَاطِلَ فَأَدْرَكَهُ.

“Do not kill the Khawarij after me; for one who sought the truth and missed it is not like one who sought falsehood and found it.”

— Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him; Nahj al-Balagha, Sermon 61

He makes the distinction.

I am not going to make it for him about anyone else.

I am not going to tell you who sought the truth and missed it, and who did not.

That is not mine to know, and it is not yours.

You heard this last week, and I want you to hear it again:

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

— from this majlis, last week: The Architecture of Guidance, Part 16, Can It Become That?

So we do not judge the man at the grave.

And we do not judge the man who came to level it either.

Their link to God is God’s.

We judge what the word was used for — and that is all we judge.

Three weeks ago I said something about the person who repeats this charge to you, and I meant it:

“Somebody gave it to them in three sentences, the same way somebody might have given it to you, and it felt like defending God, which is not a contemptible thing to want to do.”

— from this majlis, three weeks ago: The Architecture of Guidance, Part 14, Is This Idol Worship?

Answer the argument.

Leave the man alone.

Lesson Two — Religion Is Not the Fault

There is a lesson some people would like you to draw from tonight, and I want to refuse it out loud.

The lesson is:

No.

This whole series is walking the other way — towards the authority of the scholar, and towards the authority of the just jurist in the time of the Imam’s absence.

I am not going to stand here and tell you that religion in public life is the problem, and then come back in a few weeks and tell you the opposite.

The fault is narrower than that, and much more precise.

The preacher himself names it, in another of his books, Kashf al-Shubuhat, the Removal of the Doubts.

He takes the step from the people the Companions fought to the people of his own day.

Banu Hanifa, he says, testified that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is His messenger, and gave the call to prayer, and prayed; and because they raised a man to the rank of a prophet, they became unbelievers, their property and their blood lawful, and neither the testimonies nor the prayer availed them.

So what, he asks, of the one who raises a saint, or a Companion, or a prophet, to the rank of the Lord of the heavens and the earth?

In this book, that is what asking the righteous to intercede amounts to.

ويقال أيضاً: هؤلاء أصحاب رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم قاتلوا بني حنيفة، وقد أسلموا مع النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم وهم يشهدون أن لا إله إلا الله وأن محمداً رسول الله، ويؤذنون ويصلون. فإن قال: إنهم يقولون: إن مسيلمة نبي، فقل: هذا هو المطلوب، إذا كان من رفع رجلاً إلى رتبة النبي صلى الله عليه وسلم كفر وحل ماله ودمه ولم تنفعه الشهادتان ولا الصلاة، فكيف بمن رفع شمسان أو يوسف، أو صحابياً، أو نبياً إلى مرتبة جبار السموات والأرض سبحان الله ما أعظم شأنه

“And it is also said: these Companions of the Messenger of God (God bless him and grant him peace) fought Banu Hanifa — who had become Muslims with the Prophet (God bless him and grant him peace), and who testified that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God, and gave the call to prayer, and prayed. And if he says: they say that Musaylima is a prophet — say: that is exactly the point. If the one who raised a man to the rank of the Prophet (God bless him and grant him peace) became an unbeliever, and his property and his blood became lawful, and neither the two testimonies nor the prayer availed him — then what of the one who raises Shamsan, or Yusuf, or a Companion, or a prophet, to the rank of the Compeller of the heavens and the earth? Glory be to God, how great is His majesty!”

— Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Kashf al-Shubuhat, pages 39–40

That is the line.

Not religion.

Not public life.

Religion is not the fault.

That verdict is.

What Their Own Historian Wrote Down

Karbala

In the month of Dhu al-Qa’da, in the year 1216 of the hijra — the spring of 1802 — the movement’s forces came to Karbala.

I am going to tell you what happened there from one source only, and it is not ours.

It is Ibn Bishr, the movement’s own chronicler.

Everything in the next few sentences is from his pages.

They took the town by force.

They killed most of its people, in the markets and in the houses — about two thousand men, he says.

They pulled down the dome over the grave of Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him.

They took what was there: the jewelled grille around the grave, the money, the weapons, the gold, the silver, the precious copies of the Qur’an.

And then the spoils were gathered together, the fifth was set aside, and the rest was divided as ghanima — as the spoils of war.

وذلك في ذي القعدة فحشد عليها المسلمون، وتسوروا جدرانها ودخلوها عنوة، وقتلوا غالب أهلها في الأسواق والبيوت، وهدموا القبة الموضوعة بزعم من اعتقد فيها على قبر الحسين. وأخذوا ما في القبة وما حولها، وأخذوا النصيبة التي وضعوها على القبر، وكانت مرصوفة بالزمرد والياقوت والجواهر، وأخذوا جميع ما وجدوا في البلد من الأموال والسلاح واللباس والفرش والذهب والفضة والمصاحف الثمينة وغير ذلك مما يعجز عنه الحصر، ولم يلبثوا فيها إلا ضحوة وخرجوا منها قرب الظهر بجميع تلك الأموال وقتل من أهلها قريب ألفا رجل. ثم إن سعود ارتحل منها على الماء المعروف بالأبيض، فجمع الغنائم وعزل أخماسها وقسم باقيها على المسلمين غنيمة، للراجل سهم وللفارس سهمان.

“That was in Dhu al-Qa’da. The Muslims massed against it, scaled its walls and entered it by force, and killed most of its people in the markets and the houses, and demolished the dome placed — as those who believe in it claim — over the grave of al-Husayn. And they took what was in the dome and around it, and took the grille they had placed over the grave, which was set with emeralds, rubies and jewels; and they took everything they found in the town — money, weapons, clothing, furnishings, gold, silver, precious copies of the Qur’an, and more than can be counted. They stayed in it only until mid-morning, and left it near noon with all that wealth; and nearly two thousand of its men were killed. Then Saud moved from there to the water known as al-Abyad, and gathered the spoils, set aside their fifths, and divided the rest among the Muslims as ghanima: one share for the man on foot, and two for the horseman.”

— Uthman ibn Bishr, ʿUnwan al-Majd fi Tarikh Najd, Volume 1, pages 257–258

Now notice what I have not done.

I have not added to his number.

Another witness gives a much larger one; I am giving you his.

Another history puts all of this a year earlier; I am giving you his month.

And I have said nothing about women or children, because the European traveller who wrote about it says they were spared, and I am not going to say otherwise.

We do not have to prove any of it.

Their own historian wrote it down.

And I know what this does to a room like this one.

Karbala is not a place on a map to us.

It is the place.

So I am going to ask you to do something very hard: to hear it flat.

Not to perform anything.

Not to let it harden into something you carry out of here — because in a few minutes I am going to read you what the Commander of the Faithful told his own men to do with exactly this feeling.

Mecca, Then Medina

A year after Karbala, the movement was in the holy cities.

And for what happened there, I want a witness who wrote in English: a Swiss traveller who was in Mecca in 1814, and in Medina early in 1815 — about a decade after the events — and who wrote it all down, in two books later published in London.

Mecca was taken on a Saturday, the 30th of April 1803 — the 8th of Muharram, 1218.

That date comes from a letter written by the preacher’s son, who was with the army.

It is the modern editor of their chronicle who gives it, in his note; and he prefers it to the chronicler’s own telling, which would put the entry a little earlier, at the very end of 1217.

وما ذكره عبد الله ابن الشيخ محمد بن عبد الوهاب في هذه الرسالة أن دخول الأمير سعود ابن عبد العزيز مكة كان في ثامن شهر محرم سنة (١٢١٨ هـ) هو الحقيقة والصواب لأنه كان مع الأمير سعود في هذه الغزوة، وأما المؤلف الشيخ عثمان بن عبد الله بن بشر فظاهر سياق كلامه وما ذكره يفيد أن دخول الأمير سعود لمكة كان آخر شهر ذي الحجة سنة (١٢١٧ هـ) والصواب ما ذكر في خلاصة الكلام وفي تأريخ إفادة الأنام وفي رسالة الشيخ عبد الله بن محمد بن عبد الوهاب الآنفة الذكر انتهى.

“And what Abd Allah, son of Shaykh Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, mentions in this letter — that the emir Saud ibn Abd al-Aziz entered Mecca on the eighth of Muharram, 1218 — is the truth and what is correct, because he was with the emir Saud on this campaign. As for the author, Shaykh Uthman ibn Abd Allah ibn Bishr, the plain sense of his account, and of what he mentions, indicates that the emir Saud entered Mecca at the end of the month of Dhu al-Hijja, 1217; and the correct date is the one given in Khulasat al-Kalam, and in Tarikh Ifadat al-Anam, and in the letter of Shaykh Abd Allah ibn Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab mentioned above. End of quotation.”

— Ibn Bishr, ʿUnwan al-Majd, Volume 1, page 262, the editor’s note

At the great cemetery of Mecca, al-Ma’la, lies Sayyedah Khadija, peace be upon her, the first wife of the Prophet and the mother of Sayyedah Fatimah.

Here is the Swiss traveller, at her grave:

“Kaber Setna Khadidje: the tomb of Khadidje, the wife of Mohammed, the dome of which was broken down by the Wahabys, and is not yet rebuilt; it is regularly visited by hadjys, especially on Friday mornings.”

— John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia (London, 1829), Volume I, page 315

Broken, and not yet rebuilt.

And still visited — every Friday morning.

Hold on to that last line; we will need it before the night is out.

And because I promised you the fair parts: the same witness reports that they broke the domes but left the graves themselves untouched.

“…never touched the tombs themselves, and every where respected the remains of the dead.”

— John Lewis Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia (London, 1829), Volume I, page 317; the domes, in the same sentence, narrated

And their own chronicler adds that when Mecca was taken, its people were given safe-conduct, and a great deal was given out among them in alms and gifts.

فأحرموا منها بعمرة، ودخل سعود مكة واستولى عليها، وأعطى أهلها الأمان وبذل فيها من الصدقات والعطاء لأهلها شيئاً كثيراً.

“And they entered ihram there for an umra; and Saud entered Mecca and took possession of it, and gave its people safe-conduct, and gave out in it, in alms and gifts to its people, a great deal.”

— Ibn Bishr, ʿUnwan al-Majd, Volume 1, page 263

Then Medina.

It was taken in 1804 or 1805 — the sources do not agree, so I give you both — and it was taken without fighting.

An Egyptian chronicler of the time, al-Jabarti, records that they razed the domes over all the graves except the one over the tomb of the Prophet.

Their own chronicler, Ibn Bishr, says the same in his own words:

Al-Baqi’ was among them — though neither of them names it.

“But in al-Jabarti’s account, the Wahhabis took Medina without any fighting and then prohibited things forbidden by shari’a: they banned tobacco in the marketplace (implying that they tolerated private consumption) and razed the domes over all graves except for that over the tomb of the Prophet.”

— al-Jabarti, through David Commins, The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia, page 31

وفي أول هذه السنة قبل مبايعة غالب بايع أهل المدينة المنورة سعوداً على دين الله ورسوله والسمع والطاعة، وهدمت جميع القباب التي وضعها على القبور والمشاهد

“And at the beginning of this year, before Ghalib’s pledge, the people of Medina the Illuminated pledged allegiance to Saud on the religion of God and His Messenger, and on hearing and obeying; and all the domes that had been placed over the graves and the shrines were demolished.”

— Uthman ibn Bishr, ʿUnwan al-Majd fi Tarikh Najd, Volume 1, page 288

And the same Egyptian chronicler records two things more.

They abolished illegal taxes that the old rulers of Mecca had collected, down to special dues for burying the dead.

And in general, he says, the new order brought greater security and prosperity to the holy cities.

“Al-Jabarti drew an unflattering comparison to the Meccan sharifs when he mentioned that the Wahhabis abolished illegal taxes that the sharifs had collected, like special dues for the performance of burials. In general, the new regime brought greater security and prosperity to the Holy Cities.”

— al-Jabarti, through David Commins, The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia, page 31

The Prophet’s own dome was ordered down.

They tried, and they gave it up.

The traveller records that too.

And what was taken from the Prophet’s chamber, I am going to tell you exactly as the traveller tells it, and not one word more.

The town’s own strongman seized the treasure first.

Then the emir stripped the Prophet’s tomb of the valuables still in it.

And then the sentence that carries the fair half, which I will give you whole: the tomb itself was left uninjured — but the emir regarded as idolatrous any visits, prayers or exclamations addressed to it, and so he prohibited them.

And it is false, he adds, that they abolished the pilgrimage to Medina.

“Saoud had given orders that it should be demolished; but its solid structure defied the rude efforts of his soldiers; and after several of them had been killed by falling from the dome, the attempt was given up.”

“The tomb was left uninjured; but Saoud regarded as idolatrous any visits, prayers, or exclamations, addressed to it, and therefore he prohibited them. But it is false to assert, as the Turks have done, that the pilgrimage to Medinah was abolished by the Wahabys.”

— John Lewis Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys (London, 1831), Volume 2: the dome, page 110; the treasure, pages 198–199, narrated; the tomb and the visit, page 200

The tomb was left uninjured.

The visit was forbidden.

Both halves are true, and you get both of them.

And one more fair line, which travels with the facts: in Medina, the traveller says, private property was not plundered — though the town’s supplies had been cut off, Ibn Bishr tells us, by years of blockade before it gave its pledge.

“The usual tribute was required, but private property was not plundered.”

— John Lewis Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys (London, 1831), Volume 2, page 198

وتبعهم أهل قبا ومن حولهم وضيقوا على أهل المدينة وقطعوا عنهم السوابل، وأقاموا على ذلك سنين.

“And the people of Quba and those around them followed them, and they pressed the people of Medina and cut off the roads to them, and kept at that for years.”

— Ibn Bishr, ʿUnwan al-Majd, Volume 1, page 288

Our Own Authority First

Before I bring you a single Sunni voice against what was done, I want our own house to speak first.

That is the rule of this majlis and it does not bend tonight.

You heard part of this sermon of the Commander of the Faithful last week — the lines about the two kinds of people who would be destroyed over him.

This is the other part.

It is addressed to the Khawarij, and it is about the exact act we are talking about tonight: declaring the whole community unbelievers.

فإنْ أَبَيْتُمْ إِلاَّ أَنْ تَزْعُمُوا أَنِّي أَخْطَأْتُ وَضَلَلْتُ، فَلِمَ تُضَلِّلونُ عَامَّةَ أُمَّةِ مُحَمَّد(صلى الله عليه وآله) بِضَلاَلِي، وَتَأْخُذُونَهُمْ بِخَطَئِي، وَتُكَفِّرُونَهُمْ بِذُنُوِبي! سُيُوفُكُمْ عَلَى عَوَاتِقِكُمْ تَضَعُونَهَا مَوَاضِعَ البَراءةِ وَالسُّقْمِ، وَتَخْلِطُونَ مَنْ أَذْنَبَ بِمَنْ لَمْ يُذْنِبْ. وَقَدْ عَلِمْتُمْ أَنَّ رَسُولَ اللهِ(صلى الله عليه وآله) رَجَمَ الزَّانِيَ [الْـمُحْصَنَ] ثُمَّ صَلَّى عَلَيْهِ ثُمَّ وَرَّثَهُ أَهْلَهُ، وَقَتَلَ الْقَاتِلَ وَوَرَّثَ مِيرَاثَهُ أَهْلَهُ، وَقَطَعَ السَّارِقَ وَجَلَدَ الزَّانِيَ غَيْرَ الْمحْصَنِ ثُمَّ قَسَمَ عَلَيْهِمَا مِنَ الْفَيْءِ وَنَكَحَا الْمُسْلِمَاتِ; فَأَخَذَهُمْ رَسُولُ اللهِ (صلى الله عليه وآله) بِذُنُوبِهمْ، وَأَقَامَ حَقَّ اللهِ فِيهمْ، وَلَمْ يَمْنَعْهُمْ سَهْمَهُمْ مِنَ الاْسْلاَمِ، وَلَمْ يُخْرِجْ أَسْمَاءَهُمْ مِنْ بَيْنِ أَهْلِهِ.

“And if you insist on claiming that I have erred and gone astray, why do you hold the whole community of Muhammad (God bless him and his family) astray for my straying, and take them to task for my error, and declare them unbelievers for my sins? Your swords are on your shoulders: you bring them down on the sound and the sick alike, and you mix the one who has sinned with the one who has not. And you know that the Messenger of God (God bless him and his family) stoned the [married] adulterer, then prayed over him, then let his family inherit from him; and he killed the killer, and let his family inherit what he left; and he cut off the thief’s hand, and flogged the unmarried adulterer, then gave them both their share of the spoils, and they married Muslim women. So the Messenger of God (God bless him and his family) took them to task for their sins, and established God’s right in them — and he did not deny them their share in Islam, nor remove their names from among its people.”

— Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him; Nahj al-Balagha, Sermon 127

Punished — and still prayed over.

Still inherited from.

Still married.

Still named among the people of Islam.

That is the Prophet’s own way with a Muslim who has sinned, in the mouth of the Commander of the Faithful.

A sin was a sin and the law was the law — and the man stayed a Muslim.

That is our authority, and it comes first.

And Then the Sunni Witnesses

Now the Sunni witnesses — and I want them to say what they say, and not one word more.

The first is the most remarkable, because of who he was.

It is the preacher’s own brother, writing in his brother’s own lifetime.

He sets out the qualities a scholar must have before he can give a ruling of his own, and then he describes a man who will not put his words before the people of knowledge, but obliges everybody to take his word and his understanding.

Whoever opposes him, he says, is to him an unbeliever — and yet he has not one of the qualities of the people of ijtihad: no, by God, not a tenth of one.

فإنّ اليوم أُبتلى الناس بمن ينتسب إلى الكتاب والسنة، ويستنبط مِن علومهما، ولا يبالي من خالفه، وإذا طلبت منه أن يعرض كلامه على أهل العلم لم يفعل بل يوجب على الناس الأخذ بقوله وبمفهومه، ومن خالفه فهو عنده كافر هذا، وهو لم يكن فيه خصلة واحدة من خصال أهل الإجتهاد، ولا والله عشر واحدة،

“For today people have been tried by one who traces himself to the Book and the Sunna, and draws out of their sciences, and does not care who differs from him; and if you ask him to put his words before the people of knowledge, he will not — rather, he obliges people to take his word and his understanding, and whoever differs from him is, to him, an unbeliever. This — and he has not one of the qualities of the people of ijtihad; no, by God, not a tenth of one.”

— Sulayman ibn Abd al-Wahhab, al-Sawa’iq al-Ilahiyya fi’l-Radd ʿala al-Wahhabiyya, ed. al-Sarawi (Beirut, 1998), page 37

And then he closes, not with an insult, but with a prayer:

اللهمّ إهد الضّال وردّه إلى الحقّ.

“O God, guide the one astray, and bring him back to the truth.”

— Sulayman ibn Abd al-Wahhab, al-Sawa’iq al-Ilahiyya, page 37

His own brother.

A prayer for his guidance.

The second is Ibn Abidin, a Hanafi jurist of Damascus, writing after the first state had fallen.

In his great commentary on Hanafi law, he counts the followers of the movement under the definition of the Khawarij.

They held, he says, that they alone were the Muslims, and that whoever differed from them was a mushrik (polytheist) — and so they made lawful the killing of the people of the Sunna, and of their scholars.

(قولُهُ: ويُكفّرونَ أصحابَ نبيِّنا صلى الله عليه وسلم) عَلِمْتَ أنَّ هذا غيرُ شرطٍ في مُسَمَّى الخوارج، بل هو بيانٌ لمَن خرَجوا على سيدِنا “عليّ” رضيَ الله تعالى عنهُ، وإلَّا فيكفي فيهم اعتقادُهم كُفْرَ مَن خرَجوا عليهِ كما وَقَعَ في زمانِنا في أتباعِ “عبدِ الوهابِ” الَّذين خرَجوا مِن نَجْدٍ، وتغلَّبوا على الحَرَمينِ وكانوا يَنْتَحِلونَ مذهبَ الحنابلةِ، لكنَّهم اعتقدوا أنَّهم هم المسلمونَ وأنَّ مَن خالفَ اعتقادَهم مُشرِكونَ، واستباحوا بذلكَ قتلَ أهلِ السُّنةِ وقَتْلَ علمائِهم حتَّى كَسَرَ اللهُ تعالى شَوْكَتَهم وخَرَّبَ بلادَهم وظَفِرَ بهم عساكرُ المسلمينَ عامَ ثلاثةٍ وثلاثينَ ومائتينِ وألفٍ.

“(His words: ‘and they declare the Companions of our Prophet, God bless him and grant him peace, unbelievers’.) You have learned that this is not a condition for being named among the Khawarij; it only describes those who rose against our master Ali, may God the Exalted be pleased with him. Otherwise it is enough, in their case, that they believe those they rose against to be unbelievers — as happened in our own time with the followers of Abd al-Wahhab, who came out of Najd and took control of the two Sanctuaries, and who professed the school of the Hanbalis; but they believed that they alone were the Muslims, and that whoever differed from their belief was a mushrik, and on that ground they made lawful the killing of the people of the Sunna and the killing of their scholars — until God the Exalted broke their power, laid waste their lands, and gave the armies of the Muslims victory over them, in the year 1233.”

— Ibn Abidin, Radd al-Muhtar, Volume 13, page 135

I want to be careful with him in two ways.

The phrase the Khawarij of our time, which you may see quoted, is a heading his printer added; it is not his.

And his own sentence ends on the victory of a sword, which is not the note I want to close anything on.

His modern editors added a footnote warning against declaring anybody an unbeliever in either direction.

I know it is there, and I am telling you it is there.

Last week you heard Imam al-Rida speak of the Khawarij by one of their old names.

It is the same men he meant — not the same word.

Our House Answered With a Book

And our own house answered, in the movement’s own lifetime.

A marja’ of Najaf — Shaykh Ja’far Kashif al-Ghita’, who died in 1813, while the first state still stood — received a letter from one of the emirs of Najd.

And he answered it with a book.

Listen to how he begins.

The letter, he says, is words like strung pearls.

He tells the emir that he read it alone, and fairly — wary, he says, of his own leaning towards the ways of his fathers.

He asks the emir to read his reply line by line.

And he hopes that there is no quarrel between them.

أمّا بعد، فقد ورد إلى المقصّر مع ربّه التائب إليه من ذنبه. الطالب من الله السداد جعفر أقل طلبة أهل بغداد كتاب كريم مشتمل على كلمات كالدر النظيم ممن لم يزل بالمعروف آمراً وعن المنكر ناهياً زاجراً الآمر بعبادة المعبود الشيخ عبد العزيز بن سعود

“As for what follows: there has come to the one who falls short before his Lord, who turns to Him in repentance from his sin, who asks God for right guidance — Ja’far, the least of the students among the people of Baghdad — a noble letter, containing words like strung pearls, from one who has never ceased to command the good and to forbid and restrain from the evil, who commands the worship of the One who is worshipped: Shaykh Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud.”

فلما نظرته وتدبّرته وتأملته وتصوّرته خلوت في زاوية من الدار وتصفحته تصفح الإنصاف والاعتبار، وقمت متهماً لنفسي بالميل إلى العصبية والعناد والركون إلى ما عليه الآباء والأجداد.

“And when I had looked at it, pondered it, reflected on it and grasped it, I withdrew to a corner of the house and went through it as one reads in fairness and to learn, holding myself suspect of leaning towards partisanship and obstinacy, and towards resting on what the fathers and forefathers held.”

فأقسم عليك بمن جعلك متبوعاً بعد أن كنت تابعاً ومطاعاً بعد أن كنت لغيرك مطيعاً سامعا واعزّك بعدما كنت ذليلاً وكثر جمعك بعدما كان نزراً قليلاً أن تنظر ما رسمته سطراً سطرا وتمعن في تحقيق ما رقمته نظراً وفكراً متوحّشاً من الناس وقت النظر متحذراً من النفس الأمارة كل الحذر طالبا من الله كشف الحقيقة سالكاً في المناظرة واضح الطريقة فلعله يظهر أنه ليس بيننا نزاع فنحمد الله على الاتفاق والاجتماع

“I adjure you by Him who made you followed after you had been a follower, and obeyed after you had been obedient and listening to others, and gave you might after you had been lowly, and made your company many after it had been few and small: that you look at what I have set down, line by line, and give careful thought to what I have written — keeping apart from people while you read, wary of the soul that commands to evil with every wariness, asking God to uncover the truth, taking the clear road in debate. Perhaps it will become clear that there is no quarrel between us, and we will praise God for agreement and coming together.”

— Shaykh Ja’far Kashif al-Ghita’, Manhaj al-Rashad (Najaf, al-Matbaʿa al-Haydariyya), pages 2–4

The book itself gives no year.

Hamid Algar — the same scholar who sent us to him — dates the exchange to 1795: before Karbala.

“In 1210/1795, some eight years before the Wahhabi sacking of Karbala, Shaykh Ja‘far Kashif al-Ghita’ (d. 1228/1813), one of the leading Shi‘i scholars of the time, addressed to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz b. Muhammad b. Sa‘ud an elegantly and courteously worded treatise entitled Manhaj al-Rashad li man arada ’l-Sadad.”

— Hamid Algar, Wahhabism: A Critical Essay, Appendix C, page 81

That is the register we are trying to speak in tonight.

It is not new.

A marja’ of Najaf practised it two centuries ago, in the movement’s own lifetime, answering a letter — not a sword — with courtesy, and with a book.

Lessons for Our Time

Lesson Three — Nobody Gets to Make This Sunni Against Shi’a

You have just heard the sharpest voices against what was done.

And they were Sunni voices: the preacher’s own brother, in his own lifetime; and a Hanafi jurist of Damascus, after the first state fell.

So let me say this out loud, because somebody in this room needs to hear it said:

Not at a Sunni.

Not at a Shi’a.

Not at anyone.

The movement is not the religion.

And the dynasty is not the Sunni world.

I want to tell you about a conversation I have had more than once — with brothers I love, at a mosque I am honoured to pray in.

Many of our Sunni brothers will tell you that they are Wahhabi.

So I ask them what it means.

And they cannot tell me.

So I ask what they believe, and the conversation always ends up at the graveyard.

Do you visit your parents’ graves?

Of course.

Do you love the Prophet and his Household — and when God honours you with Hajj or Umrah, do you go and greet them?

Of course.

Do you hold the other schools of Islam to be mushrik?

Of course not.

And when I press them on what the word means, the answer I get is:

Is that what it is?

And these are the same brothers who, when their imam is away — and sometimes when he is standing right there — ask me to lead them in prayer.

They are not what the label says.

They were taught the label.

They are ordinary Hanafi Sunnis, or Shafi’i — good people, devoted people — and nobody ever sat down with them and explained what the word means, or what it once meant.

That is not their failure.

It is a failure of teaching.

People are lost because they have not been taught properly.

So let me say the purpose of tonight as plainly as I can.

It is not to make anybody Shi’a.

That is not our job, and it never has been.

It is to help everybody — them and us — tell a true word from the use it is put to, and to see when they are being confused.

And now I owe you something harder, which our tradition owes its own people: a text of the Commander of the Faithful that is usually either hidden or thrown.

Tonight it will be neither.

It is in his sermons, from the time of the Battle of the Camel, and he is speaking about one of the wives of the Prophet — who is, by the Qur’an’s own word, a mother of the believers.

The sermon opens by calling the people of Basra to hold themselves fast to God.

Then comes what he says about her.

Then he speaks of faith, of the rising of the dead, of the Book of God, and of the trial the Prophet foretold — and of Uhud.

And it ends with a ruling of the Prophet, which I will come to.

Here is what he says about her, whole, without a word taken out:

وَأَمَّا فُلاَنَةُ، فَأَدْرَكَهَا رَأْيُ الْنِّسَاءِ، وَضِغْنٌ غَلاَ فِي صَدْرِهَا كَمِرْجَلِ الْقَيْنِ، وَلَوْ دُعِيَتْ لِتَنَالَ مِنْ غَيْرِي مَا أَتَتْ إِلَيَّ، لَمْ تَفْعَلْ، وَلَهَا بَعْدُ حُرْمَتُهَا الاْولَى، وَالْحِسَابُ عَلَى اللهِ.

“As for a certain woman: the judgement of women overtook her, and a rancour that boiled in her breast like a smith’s cauldron; and had she been called to do to another what she did to me, she would not have done it. And she keeps, after this, her former sanctity; and the reckoning is with God.”

— Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him; Nahj al-Balagha, Sermon 156

That is hard.

I am not going to pretend it is soft.

So let our own commentator explain it first.

Ibn Maytham al-Bahrani, one of the great commentators of our school on Nahj al-Balagha, says that a certain woman is an allusion to her; that her former sanctity is her sanctity as the wife of the Messenger of God — the very ground on which the Commander of the Faithful held back from her; and that the reckoning is with God means he pardoned her in this world and left the Hereafter to God.

And he adds that the Imam may have said it before she showed her repentance.

Ibn Abi al-Hadid, the great Mu’tazili commentator, reads it the same way — and his school holds that she repented.

وفلانة كناية عن عائشة وإدراك رأي النساء لها في حربه بالبصرة

“And ‘a certain woman’ is an allusion to Aisha; and the judgement of women overtaking her is her war against him at Basra.”

وقوله: ولها بعد حرمتها الأولى. وجه اعتذاره في الكفّ عن أذاها بعد استحقاقها للأذى في نظره، وحرمتها بنكاح رسول الله صلى الله عليه وآله وسلم وكونها زوجة له.

“His words: ‘and she keeps, after this, her former sanctity’. This gives the ground of his excuse for refraining from harming her, after she had come to deserve harm in his view: her sanctity, through her marriage to the Messenger of God (God bless him and his family), and her being his wife.”

وقوله: والحساب على الله. تنبيه على أنه وإن سامحها في الدنيا بما فعلت فإن الله تعالى هو المتولي لحسابها في الآخرة، ولعل هذا الكلام منه عليه السلام قبل إظهارها للتوبة وعلمه بذلك لأنه في معنى إظهار الوعيد لها من الله.

“His words: ‘and the reckoning is with God’. A pointer that, though he pardoned her in this world for what she did, it is God the Exalted who takes charge of her reckoning in the Hereafter. And perhaps these words of his, peace be upon him, came before she showed her repentance, and before he knew of it, since they amount to declaring God’s threat against her.”

— Ibn Maytham al-Bahrani, Sharh Nahj al-Balagha, Volume 3, pages 242 and 244

ولقد عفا الله تعالى عنها، وهي من أهل الجنة عندنا بسابق الوعد، وما صحَّ من أمر التوبة.

“And God the Exalted has pardoned her; and she is of the people of Paradise in our view, by the prior promise, and by what is established of the matter of repentance.”

— Ibn Abi al-Hadid, Sharh Nahj al-Balagha, Volume 9, page 127; his reading of the sermon, pages 126–133, narrated

And the phrase about the judgement of women?

Ayatollah Jawadi Amoli, may God protect him, explains that the Imam’s words about women in his Basra sermons belong to the Camel.

Had that matter not been raised there, he says, the Imam would not have spoken that way about women.

And before God, the only measure is taqwa.

از این شواهد معلوم میشود که راجع به قضیهٴ جنگ جمل و آن حادثه است و اگر جریان عایشه و امثال عایشه در آن‌جا مطرح نبود، این‌طور حضرت درباره زن سخن نمیفرمود.

“From these indications it is clear that it concerns the affair of the Battle of the Camel and that event; and had the matter of Aisha, and of others like her, not been at issue there, the Imam would not have spoken in this way about women.”

— Ayatollah Jawadi Amoli, Tasnim, lesson on Surah al-Zukhruf (30 December 2015), my translation

And then look at what he did — because that is the real commentary on what he said.

After the battle he sent her home to Medina with forty women, turbaned and girded with swords, to guard her.

And when she arrived, she said:

جزى الله ابن أبي طالب خيراً فلقد حفظ فيَّ حرمة رسول الله صلى الله عليه وآله وسلم.

“May God reward the son of Abu Talib well; he kept the sanctity of the Messenger of God (God bless him and his family) in me.”

— Shaykh al-Mufid, al-Jamal, page 221, from al-Waqidi

Her title comes from the Qur’an itself:

ٱلنَّبِيُّ أَوۡلَىٰ بِٱلۡمُؤۡمِنِينَ مِنۡ أَنفُسِهِمۡۖ وَأَزۡوَٰجُهُۥٓ أُمَّهَٰتُهُمۡۗ وَأُوْلُواْ ٱلۡأَرۡحَامِ بَعۡضُهُمۡ أَوۡلَىٰ بِبَعۡضٖ فِي كِتَٰبِ ٱللَّهِ مِنَ ٱلۡمُؤۡمِنِينَ وَٱلۡمُهَٰجِرِينَ إِلَّآ أَن تَفۡعَلُوٓاْ إِلَىٰٓ أَوۡلِيَآئِكُم مَّعۡرُوفٗاۚ كَانَ ذَٰلِكَ فِي ٱلۡكِتَٰبِ مَسۡطُورٗا

“The Prophet is closer to the believers than their own selves, and his wives are their mothers. And those related by blood are closer to one another in the Book of God than the believers and the emigrants — except that you do a kindness to your friends. That is inscribed in the Book.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Ahzab (the Chapter of the Confederates) #33, Verse 6

Allamah Tabataba’i explains that this motherhood is the duty to revere them, and the bar on marrying them after him.

And a mother is still owed kindness.

Here is my reasoning, and I give it to you as mine: the Qur’an asks it even towards parents who strive to make you associate others with God —

وَإِن جَٰهَدَاكَ عَلَىٰٓ أَن تُشۡرِكَ بِي مَا لَيۡسَ لَكَ بِهِۦ عِلۡمٞ فَلَا تُطِعۡهُمَاۖ وَصَاحِبۡهُمَا فِي ٱلدُّنۡيَا مَعۡرُوفٗاۖ وَٱتَّبِعۡ سَبِيلَ مَنۡ أَنَابَ إِلَيَّۚ ثُمَّ إِلَيَّ مَرۡجِعُكُمۡ فَأُنَبِّئُكُم بِمَا كُنتُمۡ تَعۡمَلُونَ

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

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

Do not obey them in that.

And keep their company honourably.

Both halves, in one verse.

And now the end of that same sermon — and this is why it belongs in tonight at all.

The Commander of the Faithful remembers what the Prophet told him about the trial that would come after him:

وَقَالَ: «يَا عَلِيُّ، إِنَّ الْقَوْمَ سَيُفْتَنُونَ بِأَمْوَالِهمْ، وَيَمُنُّونَ بِدِينِهِم عَلَى رَبِّهِمْ، وَيَتَمَنَّوْنَ رَحْمَتَهُ، وَيَأْمَنُونَ سَطْوَتَهُ، وَيَسْتَحِلُّونَ حَرَامَهُ بِالشُّبُهَاتِ الْكَاذِبَةِ، وَالاْهْوَاءِ السَّاهِيَةِ، فَيَسْتَحِلُّونَ الْخَمْرَ بِالنَّبِيذِ، وَالسُّحْتَ بِالْهَدِيَّةِ، وَالرِّبَا بِالْبَيْعِ». قُلْتُ: يَا رَسُولَ اللهِ، فَبِأَيِّ الْمَنَازِلِ أُنْزِلُهُمْ عِنْدَ ذلِكَ؟ أَبِمَنْزِلَةِ رِدَّة، أَمْ بِمَنْزِلَةِ فِتْنَة؟ فَقَالَ: «بِمَنْزِلَةِ فِتْنَة».

“And he said: ‘O Ali, the people will be tried through their wealth; they will count their religion a favour to their Lord, and hope for His mercy, and feel safe from His power; and they will make lawful what He has forbidden by false doubts and heedless whims — making wine lawful by calling it date-wine, and unlawful gain by calling it a gift, and usury by calling it trade.’ I said: ‘O Messenger of God, at which station shall I place them then — at the station of apostasy, or at the station of fitna?’ He said: ‘At the station of fitna.’”

— Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him; Nahj al-Balagha, Sermon 156

Not apostasy.

Even people who make lawful what God has forbidden, through false doubts, are not to be placed outside Islam.

That is the Prophet’s ruling, carried by the Commander of the Faithful, against everything you heard about the testimonies not protecting anybody.

And one last thing about her, which almost nobody says.

She is buried at al-Baqi’.

And when al-Baqi’ was levelled the second time, the domes over the graves of the wives of the Prophet came down with all the rest.

وتوفيت في سنة سبع وخمسين للهجرة، وعمرها أربع وستون سنة، ودفنت بالبَقيع، في مُلْك معاوية، وصلّى عليها المسلمون ليلاً، وأمّهم أبو هريرة.

“And she died in the year fifty-seven of the hijra, at the age of sixty-four, and was buried at al-Baqi’, in the reign of Mu’awiya; and the Muslims prayed over her at night, and Abu Hurayra led them.”

— Ibn Abi al-Hadid, Sharh Nahj al-Balagha, Volume 9, page 127; the domes over the graves of his wives: Sayyed Muhsin al-Amin, Kashf al-Irtiyab, page 60, quoted in Point 3

The levelling took the graves of people every Muslim honours.

Nobody gets to make this Sunni against Shi’a.

Lesson Four — Describe Their Deeds. Do Not Revile Them.

Karbala, a little while ago.

I asked you to hear it flat.

Here is why.

At Siffin, the Commander of the Faithful heard some of his own men reviling the people of Sham — the army they were fighting, the army that was trying to kill them. And he stopped them:

إِنِّي أَكْرَهُ لَكُمْ أَنْ تَكُونُوا سَبَّابِينَ، وَلكِنَّكُمْ لَوْ وَصَفْتُمْ أَعْمَالَهُمْ، وَذَكَرْتُمْ حَالَهُمْ، كَانَ أَصْوَبَ فِي الْقَوْلِ، وَأَبْلَغَ فِي الْعُذْرِ، وَقُلْتُمْ مَكَانَ سَبِّكُمْ إِيَّاهُمْ: اللَّهُمَّ احْقِنْ دِمَاءَنَا وَدِمَاءَهُمْ، وَأَصْلِحْ ذَاتَ بَيْنِنَا وَبَيْنِهِمْ، وَاهْدِهِمْ مِنْ ضَلاَلَتِهِمْ، حَتَّى يَعْرِفَ الْحَقَّ مَنْ جَهِلَهُ، وَيَرْعَوِيَ عَنِ الْغَيِّ وَالْعُدْوَانِ مَنْ لَهِجَ بِهِ.

“I dislike for you that you should be revilers. But if you were to describe their deeds and mention their condition, that would be more right in speech and more complete as an excuse; and if, in place of your reviling them, you were to say: ‘O God, spare our blood and their blood, set right what is between us and them, and guide them out of their misguidance, so that whoever is ignorant of the truth may come to know it, and whoever is set upon error and aggression may turn back from it.’”

— Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him; Nahj al-Balagha, Sermon 206

Said to his own men, about an army in the field against him.

And what he gives them is not a better insult.

It is a prayer for their enemies’ guidance.

That is the method of this whole evening.

We have described their deeds — from their own historian, with his page numbers.

And we have not reviled them.

The preacher’s brother prayed

Shaykh Ja’far hoped there was

It is one register, and it is his.

The Second Levelling, and What Is Still Being Levelled

The Third State

In 1902 a member of the family took Riyadh, and began what would become the third state.

I will call him by what he did, not by his name: the king who built the present state.

One sentence about where the money came from, because the forgery we refused tonight pretends to tell that story, and the true story is plainer.

In December 1915 he signed a treaty with Britain, and received rifles, twenty thousand pounds, and then five thousand pounds a month, until 1924.

The British Empire is not the British people, any more than a dynasty is a people.

But that is the true story, plainly told — and it is exactly what the forgery distorted.

Then the Hijaz.

Ta’if, in September 1924, plundered for three days.

Mecca, in December 1924.

Medina had surrendered by December 1925.

And on the 8th of January 1926 he was proclaimed king of the Hijaz.

“The town was plundered for three days after which its inhabitants succumbed to Saʿudi rule.”

“His troops entered the holy city on 5 December 1924.”

— Madawi al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, pages 38, 40, 43–44; David Commins, The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia, page 77

The Second Levelling

And now al-Baqi’.

This time it was not a raid.

It was a question, put formally.

The chief judge — I will give you his office and not his name — put a question in five parts to the scholars of Medina.

Is it permitted to build over graves, and to take them as places of worship?

If it is not, must the buildings come down, and prayer at them be stopped?

If a building stands in an endowed cemetery, like al-Baqi’, and keeps people from the ground it covers, is it usurpation that must be removed?

What of the things the ignorant do at the shrines — touching them, calling on the dead alongside God, sacrifices and vows, lamps?

And what of what is done at the Prophet’s own chamber?

Hold on to the third part.

It is the only one that is not about worship at all.

It is about land: whether a building took for a few what had been given to all.

وإذا كان البناء في مسبلة كالبقيع وهو مانع من الانتفاع بالمقدار المبني عليها فهل هو غصب يجب رفعه لما فيه من ظلم المستحقين ومنعهم استحقاقهم أم لا؟

“And if the building is in endowed ground such as al-Baqi’, and keeps people from using the ground it is built on, is it a usurpation that must be removed, for the wrong it does to those entitled and its denial of what is theirs — or not?”

— the question, its third part: Sayyed Muhsin al-Amin, Kashf al-Irtiyab, page 359

The answer is dated the 25th of Ramadan, 1344 — a Thursday, the 8th of April, 1926.

Building over graves, it says, is forbidden by consensus.

And it gives its grounds: first the report of Abu al-Hayyaj — the one you heard at the beginning of tonight — and then a report from Ibn Abbas, which is the very report in the preacher’s own chapter.

It forbids places of worship over graves, and lamps on them; and touching them, and sacrifices and vows at them, and calling on the dead.

And at the Prophet’s own chamber, it says that facing it in prayer is better prevented, and that circling it, touching it and kissing it are forbidden.

Now here is the thing I want you to notice.

The question offered them a reason — usurpation, endowed land.

And the answer never uses it.

Not once.

The question supplied the argument, and the answer did not touch it.

أما البناء على القبور فهو ممنوع إجماعا لصحة الأحاديث الواردة في منعه ولهذا أفتى كثير من العلماء بوجوب هدمه مستندين على ذلك بحديث علي رضي الله عنه أنه قال لأبي الهياج: “ ألا أبعثك على ما بعثني عليه رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم أن لا تدع تمثالا إلا طمسته، ولا قبراً مشرفا إلا سويته “1 رواه مسلم.

“As for building over graves, it is forbidden by consensus, because the hadiths that have come forbidding it are sound; and for this reason many scholars gave the ruling that it must be demolished, relying for that on the hadith of Ali, may God be pleased with him, that he said to Abu al-Hayyaj: ‘Shall I not send you on what the Messenger of God, God bless him and grant him peace, sent me on: that you leave no image without effacing it, and no raised grave without levelling it.’ Narrated by Muslim.”

— the opening of the answer, as printed by ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-ʿAbd al-Latif, Da’awa al-Munawi’in, Volume 1, page 307; the rest narrated from Sayyed Muhsin al-Amin, Kashf al-Irtiyab, pages 359–360

It was printed in the official newspaper in Mecca, Umm al-Qura — issue number 69, the 17th of Shawwal 1344, a Friday, the 30th of April 1926.

We know that because a scholar who writes in the movement’s defence cites it.

جريدة أم القرى، عدد 69، 17 شوال 1344هـ.

“Umm al-Qura newspaper, issue 69, 17 Shawwal 1344 AH.”

— ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-ʿAbd al-Latif, Da’awa al-Munawi’in, Volume 1, page 307, his footnote to the answer

And then the domes came down.

Sayyed Muhsin al-Amin, may God rest his pure soul — a scholar of our school from Jabal Amil, who wrote a long answer to all of this in his book Kashf al-Irtiyab — lists them.

The domes of the Imams.

Of al-Abbas.

Of the Prophet’s parents.

Of his wives.

Of Uthman.

Of Isma’il.

Of Malik.

وبعد صدور هذا السؤال والجواب هدموا جميع ما بالمدينة ونواحيها من القباب والأضرحة والمزارات فهدموا قبة أئمة أهل البيت بالبقيع ومعهم العباس عم النبي صلى الله عليه وآله وسلم وجدرانها وأزالوا الصندوق والقفص الموضوعين على قبورهم وصرفوا على ذلك ألف ريال مجيدي ولم يتركوا غير أحجار موضوعة على تلك القبور كالعلامة وهدموا قباب عبد الله وآمنة أبوي النبي صلى الله عليه وآله وسلم وأزواجه وعثمان بن عفان وإسماعيل بن جعفر الصادق ومالك إمام دار الهجرة وغير ذلك مما يطول باستيفائه الكلام

“And after this question and answer were issued, they demolished everything in Medina and its surroundings of domes, shrines and places of visitation. They demolished the domes of the Imams of the Household at al-Baqi’, and with them that of al-Abbas, the uncle of the Prophet (God bless him and his family), and their walls, and removed the casing and the cage placed over their graves — and spent a thousand Majidi riyals on it — and left nothing but stones laid on those graves as markers. And they demolished the domes of Abd Allah and Amina, the parents of the Prophet (God bless him and his family), and of his wives, and of Uthman ibn Affan, and of Isma’il ibn Ja’far al-Sadiq, and of Malik, the imam of the Abode of Emigration, and more besides, which it would take too long to list in full.”

— Sayyed Muhsin al-Amin, Kashf al-Irtiyab, page 60

In the spring of 1926.

Listen to that list again.

Not the domes of one community.

The domes over the Imams of the Household — and over a caliph, and over the founder of one of the four Sunni schools, and over the wives of the Prophet.

To the claim of consensus, Sayyed al-Amin answers with the unbroken practice of Muslims of every school.

(الأول) الإجماع المشار إليه بقولهم البناء على القبور ممنوع إجماعًا (والجواب) بطلان دعوى الإجماع بل هو جائز إجماعًا لاستمرار عمل المسلمين عليه من جميع المذاهب في كل عصر وزمان عالمهم وجاهلهم مفضولهم وفاضلهم أميرهم ومأمورهم رجالهم ونسائهم سنيهم وشيعيهم قبل ظهور الوهابية توافقوا عليه في جميع الأجيال والأعصار والأمصار والنواحي والأقطار بدون منع ولا إنكار

“(The first): the consensus they point to in saying ‘building over graves is forbidden by consensus’. (And the answer): the claim of consensus is void. Rather, it is permitted by consensus, because the practice of the Muslims of every school has continued upon it in every age and time — their learned and their unlearned, the lesser and the greater of them, their rulers and their ruled, their men and their women, their Sunnis and their Shi’a — before the appearance of the Wahhabis. They agreed upon it in every generation and age, in every city, region and land, without prohibition or objection.”

— Sayyed Muhsin al-Amin, Kashf al-Irtiyab, page 360

And the argument from endowment — that the cemetery was common land, and nobody may build on it?

Our answer to it is Sayyed al-Amin’s, and he takes it from their own historians.

No one ever reported, he says, that al-Baqi’ was endowed.

From al-Samhudi he adds that al-Baqi’ was once ground covered in boxthorn, cleared for the first burials, each tribe taking its own side of it.

And an early historian of Medina, Ibn Shabba, records that the first of the graves of Banu Hashim lay in the house of Aqil — a family’s own house.

The great historian of Medina, al-Samhudi, carries the same report.

أن تسبيلها أي وقفها في سبيل الله مقبرة للمسلمين دعوى بلا دليل إذ لم ينقل ناقل أن أحداً وقفها لذلك فهي باقية على الإباحة الأصلية

“That it was endowed — that is, made a waqf in the way of God, as a cemetery for the Muslims — is a claim without proof: no one has ever reported that anyone endowed it for that. So it remains on its original permissibility.”

وروى أبو غسان عن أبي سلمة بن عبد الرحمن عن أبيه لما توفي إبراهيم ابن رسول الله صلى الله عليه وآله وسلم أمر أن يدفن عند عثمان بن مظعون فرغب الناس في البقيع وقطعوا الشجر فاختارت كل قبيلة ناحية فمن هنالك عرفت كل قبيلة مقابرها

“And Abu Ghassan reported from Abu Salama ibn Abd al-Rahman, from his father: when Ibrahim, the son of the Messenger of God (God bless him and his family), died, he commanded that he be buried beside Uthman ibn Maz’un; and people became eager for al-Baqi’, and cut down the trees, and each tribe chose a side; and from then on each tribe knew its graves.”

وروى ابن أبي شبة عن قدامة بن موسى كان البقيع غرقداً فلما هلك عثمان بن مظعون دفن بالبقيع وقطع الغرقد عنه

“And Ibn Shabba reported from Qudama ibn Musa: al-Baqi’ was boxthorn; and when Uthman ibn Maz’un died, he was buried at al-Baqi’, and the boxthorn was cut away from him.”

— Sayyed Muhsin al-Amin, Kashf al-Irtiyab, pages 371–372, quoting al-Samhudi, Wafa’ al-Wafa

قال عبد العزيز: دُفنَ العباس بن عبد المطلب عند قبر فاطمة بنت أسد بن هاشم في أول مقابر بني هاشم التي في دار عقيل.

“Abd al-Aziz said: al-Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib was buried by the grave of Fatimah bint Asad ibn Hashim, at the first of the graves of Banu Hashim, which are in the house of Aqil.”

قال: وقد سمعت من يقول: دفن في موقع من البقيع متوسطا.

“He said: and I have heard someone say: he was buried at a spot in the middle of al-Baqi’.”

— Ibn Shabba, Tarikh al-Madina, Volume 1, page 127; the same report in al-Samhudi, Wafa’ al-Wafa, Volume 3, page 910

I want to be careful here.

Ibn Shabba records it.

I am not telling you it is proven.

Both books give a second view as well, and the man Ibn Shabba heard it from is weakened by their own critics.

But it is in their books — and it is a fair answer to an argument that the answer of 1926 never even used.

Two more cautions.

The year was 1926 — not 1925, which you will often hear.

And I am giving you no day for the demolition itself: the date you will often see, the 8th of Shawwal, I cannot find on any page I can show you.

And Sayyed Muhsin al-Amin says that the scholars of Medina signed that answer in fear.

That is his judgement, and I give it to you as his.

An Englishman at al-Baqi’

After it, an English traveller came to Medina, and walked into al-Baqi’.

He wrote down what he saw:

“When I entered the Bakia the sight which I saw was as it were a town which had been razed to the ground.”

— Eldon Rutter, The Holy Cities of Arabia, Volume 2, page 256

And a page later, the whole of the paragraph:

“Demolished and gone were the great white domes which formerly marked the graves of the members of Muhammad’s family, of the Third Khalifa, Othman, of the Imam Malik, and of others. Lesser monuments had suffered a like fate, and even the little cages of jerid sticks, with which the poor cover the graves of their dead, had all been crushed and thrown aside, or burnt.”

— Eldon Rutter, The Holy Cities of Arabia, Volume 2, page 257

The little cages of palm sticks that the poor put over the graves of their dead.

I am stopping at the end of his paragraph.

What comes after it is not what he saw.

Policy, Not a Passing Zeal

And it was not a passing zeal.

The next year, 1927, the kingdom’s scholars ruled that the tombs on graves should be destroyed — and in the same breath, that the Shi’a of al-Hasa should give up their innovations and become, in their phrase, true Muslims.

“They recommended that tombs on graves should be destroyed.”

— Madawi al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, page 64; the second ruling, on al-Hasa, narrated

That is the second levelling.

Not a mob, and not a moment.

A question, an answer, a newspaper, and a ruling.

Her Mother’s House

Go back to Mecca for a moment — to Sayyedah Khadija, peace be upon her, whose dome at al-Ma’la you heard was broken, and whose grave was still being visited every Friday morning.

Our own books tell how her daughter was born.

Shaykh al-Saduq records that when Sayyedah Khadija’s time came, she sent for the women of Quraysh and of Banu Hashim to come to her, and they would not come; and that four women came in to her.

فلم تزل خديجة (عليها السلام) على ذلك إلى أن حضرت ولادتها، فوجهت إلى نساء قريش وبني هاشم: أن تعالين لتلين مني ما تلي النساء من النساء، فأرسلن إليها: أنت عصيتنا، ولم تقبلي قولنا، وتزوجت محمدا يتيم أبي طالب فقيرا لا مال له، فلسنا نجئ ولا نلي من أمرك شيئا. فاغتمت خديجة (عليها السلام) لذلك، فبينا هي كذلك، إذ دخل عليها أربع نسوة سمر طوال، كأنهن من نساء بني هاشم، ففزعت منهن لما رأتهن، فقالت إحداهن: لا تحزني يا خديجة فإنا رسل ربك إليك، ونحن أخواتك، أنا سارة، وهذه آسية بنت مزاحم، وهي رفيقتك في الجنة، وهذه مريم بنت عمران، وهذه كلثوم (2) اخت موسى بن عمران، بعثنا الله إليك لنلي منك ما تلي النساء من النساء، فجلست واحدة عن يمينها، واخرى عن يسارها، والثالثة بين يديها، والرابعة من خلفها، فوضعت فاطمة (عليها السلام) طاهرة مطهرة، فلما سقطت إلى الارض أشرق منها النور حتى دخل بيوتات مكة، ولم يبق في شرق الارض ولا غربها موضع إلا أشرق فيه ذلك النور.

“And Khadija, peace be upon her, remained so until the time of her delivery came. Then she sent to the women of Quraysh and of Banu Hashim: ‘Come, and attend to me as women attend to women.’ And they sent back to her: ‘You disobeyed us, and did not accept our word, and married Muhammad, the orphan of Abu Talib, a poor man with no wealth; so we will not come, nor attend to anything of yours.’ Khadija, peace be upon her, was grieved at that. And while she was so, four tall women, dark of complexion, came in to her, as if they were women of Banu Hashim; and she was alarmed at them when she saw them. And one of them said: ‘Do not grieve, O Khadija, for we are the messengers of your Lord to you, and we are your sisters: I am Sarah; and this is Asiya, daughter of Muzahim, and she is your companion in Paradise; and this is Maryam, daughter of Imran; and this is Kulthum, sister of Musa son of Imran. God has sent us to you, to attend to you as women attend to women.’ And one sat at her right, and another at her left, and the third before her, and the fourth behind her; and she gave birth to Fatimah, peace be upon her, pure and purified. And when she came down to the earth, a light shone from her until it entered the houses of Mecca, and there remained no place in the east of the earth or in its west but that light shone in it.”

— Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him; Shaykh al-Saduq, al-Amali, Assembly 87, hadith 1

And the Swiss traveller, in 1814, was shown the place:

“Mouled Setna Fatme, or the birth-place of Fatme, the daughter of Mohammed, is shown in a good stone building, said to have been the house of her mother Khadidje, in the street called Zogag el Hadjar.”

— Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, Volume I, page 313

And a page later:

“All these Mouleds had undergone complete repair since the retreat of the Wahabys, except that of Mohammed, on which the workmen were still employed.”

— Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, Volume I, page 314

I keep his caution; it is his.

And what became of that house since?

Ziauddin Sardar, a Muslim writer and cultural critic, records it in his history of Mecca, published in 2014:

“At the opposite end of the Grand Mosque Complex, as it is now called, the house of Khadijah, the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad, has been turned into a block of toilets.”

— Ziauddin Sardar, Mecca: The Sacred City (Bloomsbury, 2014), chapter 11, “The Reconfigured Utopia”

I am going to say nothing after that sentence.

The Old Tools, Taken Up Again

I am going to be gentle with this part.

But I will not skip it.

Remember the preacher’s own step: that the testimony of faith and the prayer do not protect a man; that his blood and property are lawful.

That is a tool.

And tools outlive the men who made them.

In our own time, al-Qaeda took up the old tools — dissociation, declaring other Muslims unbelievers, and war — and turned them even on the Saudi state itself.

“The traditional concepts of dissociation from unbelievers, takfir and jihad were now wielded against the Wahhabi state itself (al-Rasheed, 2007, 258–9).”

— Michael Crawford, Ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, chapter 9

In February 2006 the shrine of the two Imams at Samarra — the tenth and the eleventh Imams of the Household, peace and blessings be upon them — was bombed.

Five months earlier, al-Qaeda in Iraq, under Zarqawi, had declared war on the Shi’a.

I will not say more than the report I hold says.

“The bomb attack on a sacred Shiite shrine in Samarra on 22 February 2006 and subsequent reprisals against Sunni mosques and killings of Sunni Arabs is only the latest and bloodiest indication that Iraq is teetering on the threshold of wholesale disaster.”

— International Crisis Group, Middle East Report N°52, The Next Iraqi War? Sectarianism and Civil Conflict (27 February 2006): the bombing, page i; al-Qaeda in Iraq and Zarqawi, pages 14–17

And that October, Ayatollah Jawadi Amoli, may God protect him, spoke of the shrine at Samarra, naming no one, and said:

مقدسات هر كسي محترم است

“Everyone’s sanctities are to be respected.”

— Ayatollah Jawadi Amoli, Tasnim, lesson on Surah al-Nahl (31 October 2006), my translation

Then the group that called itself the Islamic State — ISIS, also known as DAESH.

Cole Bunzel, a scholar of the movement’s history and of jihadism, writing research papers for the Brookings Institution and the Carnegie Endowment, put it like this in 2016:

“Many of the Islamic State’s official publications are classic works of the Wahhabi canon, including some by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself.”

— Cole Bunzel, The Kingdom and the Caliphate: Duel of the Islamic States (Carnegie, 2016), page 8

And it declared the kingdom’s own rulers apostates.

“The Islamic State, like jihadi groups before it, declares the kingdom’s rulers apostates, unbelievers who have abandoned the religion and must be killed.”

— Cole Bunzel, The Kingdom and the Caliphate, page 5

And then the same scholar, in the same paper, gives his own measure.

I want you to hear it, because it is the line that keeps us honest:

“The Islamic State is, therefore, by no means the inevitable expression of historical Wahhabism.”

— Cole Bunzel, The Kingdom and the Caliphate, page 10

“And the vast majority of Wahhabis, or Salafis, reject the violence and the political project of the Islamic State.”

— Cole Bunzel, The Kingdom and the Caliphate, page 25

Hold on to that.

People and systems are not the same thing.

Our House First

Now our own house — before anybody else’s.

In February 2015, Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ali al-Husayni al-Sistani, the senior marja’ in Najaf, may God protect him, had his office issue twenty points of advice and guidance to the fighters on the battlefield — in Arabic, and in English.

By the majesty of God, he warns them, beware of casting suspicion on people’s faith in order to make what is sacred in them lawful — the way, he writes, of the Kharijites of the early period, and of those who follow them now, who justify it with texts they never understood.

And then this, in his office’s own English:

واعلموا إنّ من شهد الشهادتين كان مسلماً يُعصم دمُه ومالُه وإن وقع في بعض الضلالة وارتكب بعض البدعة، فما كلّ ضلالة بالتي توجب الكفر، ولا كلّ بدعة تؤدي إلى نفي صفة الاسلام عن صاحبها، وربما استوجب المرء القتل بفساد أو قصاص وكان مسلماً .

“Know that whosoever bears testimony that there is only one God and that Muhammad is His messenger is indeed a Muslim. That person’s life and property must be safeguarded. If that person falls into the trap of [theological] deviance and religious innovations, then know that not every misguidance leads to infidelity, nor does every innovation strip one of Islam as his faith. At times, a person is subjected to death penalty due to a turmoil caused by him or due to retribution he still stays a Muslim.”

— Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ali al-Husayni al-Sistani, may God protect him; Advice and Guidance to the Fighters on the Battlefields (Najaf, 22 Rabiʿ al-Akhir 1436 / 12 February 2015), paragraph 6, in his office’s English

Whoever bears the testimony is a Muslim.

The preacher’s verdict was that the testimonies do not protect.

Here is our marja’ — to men under arms, in a war — telling them that they do.

Then he gives them a report, from Imam al-Sadiq, from his father, about how the Commander of the Faithful spoke of the people who fought him:

ففي الأثر المعتبر عن الامام الصادق عن ابيه (عليهما السلام): (أنّ علياً (عليه السلام) لم يكن ينسب أحداً من أهل حربه إلى الشرك ولا إلى النفاق ولكن يقول: هم اخواننا بغوا علينا )، (وكان يقول لأهل حربه: إنا لم نقاتلهم على التكفير لهم ولم نقاتلهم على التكفير لنا).

“In a sound report on the authority of [Imam] al-Sadiq who narrates on the authority of his father, peace be upon them both, that ‘ʿAli, peace be upon him, did not label any of those who fought him as polytheists or hypocrites but rather he would say, “They are our brothers who have transgressed against us” and he would [also] say about those who fought him “We fight them not because we think of them as unbelievers and not because they think we are unbelievers.”’”

— Advice and Guidance to the Fighters on the Battlefields, paragraph 6, in his office’s English

And then this, to men who had every reason to hate the people in front of them:

واعلموا أنّ أكثر من يقاتلكم إنّما وقع في الشبهة بتضليل آخرين ، فلا تعينوا هؤلاء المضلّين بما يوجب قوّة الشبهة في أذهان الناس حتّى ينقلبوا أنصاراً لهم، بل ادرؤوها بحسن تصرّفكم ونصحكم واخذكم بالعدل والصفح في موضعه، وتجنب الظلم والإساءة والعدوان، فإنّ من درأ شبهة عن ذهن امرئ فكأنّه أحياه ، ومن أوقع امرئ في شبهة من غير عذر فكأنه قتله.

“Know that most of those who fight you are victims who have been led astray by others. Do not let those who led others astray be better than you. Let your righteous actions, your well-wishing nature, your just conduct, your forbearance, and your avoidance of extortion, sin and aggression serve as an example for them. Whosoever helps misguided souls find the path of righteousness is like the one who saves a soul from perdition. And whomsoever misguides a person knowingly it is as if he has killed him.”

— Advice and Guidance to the Fighters on the Battlefields, paragraph 11, in his office’s English

And in the same letter he gave them the verse we opened with, the sermon we heard after Karbala, and the Commander of the Faithful’s answer to no rule but God’s.

And Ayatollah Jawadi Amoli, may God protect him, has put the whole long story of this in one sentence — about both sides at once: one sat on this side and prayed that God’s mercy be distant from the other; the other sat on that side and called him a mushrik — and so it stayed, until DAESH appeared and took up arms.

این از این طرف نشسته او را لعن کرده و او از آن طرف نشسته این را مشرک دانسته، همین طور ماند تا داعش پیدا شد و دست به اسلحه برد.

“This one sat on this side and prayed that God’s mercy be distant from that one; and that one sat on that side and counted this one a mushrik. And so it stayed, until DAESH appeared and took up arms.”

— Ayatollah Jawadi Amoli, Tasnim, lesson on Surah al-Hujurat (28 September 2016), my translation

And Their Own Religious Office

And then — by his office, and only by his office — the Grand Mufti of the kingdom itself.

In August 2014, in a public statement, he named the so-called DAESH and al-Qaeda and the groups that branched from them, and said:

وهذه الجماعات الخارجية لا تحسب على الإسلام , ولا على أهله المتمسكين بهديه, بل هي امتداد للخوارج الذين هم أول فرقة مرقت من الدين بسبب تكفيرها المسلمين بالذنوب , فاستحلت دماءهم وأموالهم .

“And these Kharijite groups are not to be counted against Islam, nor against its people who hold fast to its guidance; rather, they are an extension of the Khawarij, the first sect to pass out of the religion because it declared Muslims unbelievers over sins, and so made their blood and their property lawful.”

— the Grand Mufti of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, “An Insight and a Reminder”, Saudi Press Agency, August 2014 (the date as given by Cole Bunzel, The Kingdom and the Caliphate, page 23; the statement itself carries none); my translation

Lessons for Our Time

Lesson Five — Do Not Carry It as a Grievance

Three weeks ago I said something to the people in this room who have been hurt by this charge — and some of you have been.

I want to say it again, now that you have heard the whole of it:

“It would be very easy to carry this the wrong way. To let it settle into a grievance you take out and turn over. To become somebody who is always half-waiting for the next time it gets said, so you can be ready.”

“Do not do that. It will cost you far more than it costs them.”

— from this majlis, three weeks ago: The Architecture of Guidance, Part 14, Is This Idol Worship?

Let me show you what it costs, with a report from our own books.

A man among the Companions had a single palm tree, and it stood in the garden of a man of the Ansar.

He would walk through the Ansari’s garden to reach it, whenever he liked, without asking leave — and the family inside had no privacy.

The Ansari complained to the Prophet.

And the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions, asked the man to seek permission when he came.

He refused.

So the Prophet offered to buy the tree.

He refused.

The Prophet raised the price — in one report, to ten palms.

He refused. And then the Prophet offered him a palm in Paradise.

And he refused that too.

And the Prophet said to him:

إِنَّكَ رَجُلٌ مُضَارٌّ وَلا ضَرَرَ وَلا ضِرَارَ عَلَى مُؤْمِنٍ

“You are a man who does harm; and there is no harm and no harassment against a believer.”

And he had the tree uprooted, and thrown down in front of the man, and said:

انْطَلِقْ فَاغْرِسْهَا حَيْثُ شِئْتَ.

“Go, and plant it wherever you wish.”

— the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions; Shaykh al-Kulayni, al-Kafi, Volume 5, the chapter on harm, hadiths 2 and 8 (the man is named there: Samura ibn Jundab)

He held on to the place where one tree stood — and he lost a palm in Paradise.

And the tree was uprooted anyway.

I am not telling you anything about that man’s ending.

That is God’s.

I am telling you what holding on did to him.

A grievance is a tree you will not let go of, standing in somebody else’s garden.

It will cost you far more than it costs them.

Lesson Six — What Are You Building?

They levelled what others had built.

That is the history, and you have heard it.

But this whole series has been asking a different question, and it is the only one that is ours to answer:

Not what are we against.

Not what was taken from us.

What are we building — in our homes, in our children, in this community, and in the way we speak to the brothers at the mosque down the road?

The Prophet gave that man an instruction at the end, and I want you to hear it as if it were said to you.

So plant something.

The Close

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

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

So let me leave you three sentences.

None of them is mine.

The first is God’s:

The second is the Commander of the Faithful’s, about a slogan raised against him:

And the third is his too, to his own men, about an army that was fighting them:

Conclusion — Key Takeaways

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

The first. Test the use, not the slogan — and never the heart.

When somebody hands you a true word — a verse, a report, a slogan, tawhid itself — ask what it is being used for.

Do not ask what is in his heart.

You cannot see it.

Neither can I.

And turn the question round.

The next time a slogan of ours comes past you — on a banner, in a chant, on a phone screen — ask it of that too.

A true word put to the wrong work is no safer in our mouths than in anybody else’s.

The second. Describe their deeds. Do not revile them.

If you have to speak about what was done at Karbala, at Medina, at al-Baqi’, speak about it the way their own historian wrote it down: what was done, where, and when.

Leave the insults out.

They add nothing to the truth, and they take a great deal away from you.

And when a conversation turns sharp — at work, at the school gate, at your own family’s table — reach for his prayer before you reach for the last word: the prayer that God set right what is between us and them, and guide them.

That is what the Commander of the Faithful put in his own men’s mouths, about men who were fighting them.

And the third. Do not carry it. Build.

A grievance costs you far more than it costs them.

Put it down — and plant something: in your home, in your children, and in the way you speak to the brothers at the mosque down the road.

And the last line, before I hand you on to next week, is the one I began with.

Next week, God willing:

What Is a Hawza?

You met a marja’ of Najaf tonight who answered a letter with a book.

Next week we ask what a school like his is for.

Eulogy — Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, peace and blessings be upon her, and the Ground of al-Baqi’

She asked for it to be hidden.

Near the end, Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, peace and blessings be upon her, made her will to the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him.

That he should perform her rites himself.

That he should bury her at night.

And that he should erase the trace of her grave.

فلما حضرتها الوفاة وصت أمير المؤمنين عليه السلام أن يتولى أمرها، ويدفنها ليلا، ويعفي قبرها .

“And when death came to her, she made her will to the Commander of the Faithful, peace be upon him: that he should take charge of her rites, and bury her by night, and efface her grave.”

— Imam al-Husayn ibn Ali, peace and blessings be upon him; Shaykh al-Mufid, al-Amali, Assembly 33, hadith 7

And he did.

He buried her in secret, and he hid the place of her grave.

لَمَّا قُبِضَتْ فَاطِمَةُ (عليها السلام) دَفَنَهَا أَمِيرُ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ سِرّاً وَعَفَا عَلَى مَوْضِعِ قَبْرِهَا

“When Fatimah, peace be upon her, passed away, the Commander of the Faithful buried her in secret, and effaced the place of her grave.”

— Imam al-Husayn ibn Ali, peace and blessings be upon him; Shaykh al-Kulayni, al-Kafi, Volume 1, the chapter on the birth of Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, hadith 3

And then he turned towards the grave of her father — the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions — and he spoke to him as one confides in somebody he trusts, at night:

السَّلاَمُ عَلَيْكَ يَا رَسُولَ اللهِ عَنِّي، وَعَنِ ابْنَتِكَ النَّازِلَةِ فِي جِوَارِكَ، وَالسَّرِيعَةِ اللَّحَاقِ بِكَ! قَلَّ يَا رَسُولَ اللهِ، عَنْ صَفِيَّتِكَ صَبْرِي، وَرَقَّ عَنْهَا تَجَلُّدِي، إِلاَّ أَنَّ لِي فِي التَّأَسِّيِ بِعَظِيمِ فُرْقَتِكَ، وَفَادِحِ مُصِيبَتِكَ، مَوْضِعَ تَعَزّ، فَلَقَدْ وَسَّدْتُكَ فِي مَلْحُودَةِ قَبْرِكَ، وَفَاضَتْ بَيْنَ نَحْرِي وَصَدْرِي نَفْسُكَ. ﴿إِنَّا لِلَّهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ﴾‏.

“Peace be upon you, O Messenger of God, from me, and from your daughter, who has come down to rest beside you and has been swift to join you. Little, O Messenger of God, is my patience over your chosen one, and my endurance has worn thin over her — except that, in the example of my great parting from you and the crushing weight of your loss, I have a place of consolation: for I laid you in the niche of your grave, and your soul flowed out between my throat and my chest. Truly we belong to God, and truly to Him we return.

فَلَقَدِ اسْتُرْجِعَتِ الْوَدِيعَةُ، وَأُخِذَتِ الرَّهِينَةُ! أَمَّا حُزْنِي فَسَرْمَدٌ، وَأَمَّا لَيْلِي فَمُسَهَّدٌ، إِلَى أَنْ يَخْتَارَ اللهُ لِي دَارَكَ الَّتِي أَنْتَ بِهَا مُقِيمٌ. وَسَتُنَبِّئُكَ ابْنَتُكَ بِتَضَافُرِ أُمَّتِكَ عَلَى هَضْمِهَا، فَأَحْفِهَا السُّؤَالَ، وَاسْتَخْبِرْهَا الْحَالَ، هذَا وَلَمْ يَطُلِ الْعَهْدُ، وَلَمْ يَخْلُ مِنْكَ الذِّكْرُ.

“The trust has been taken back, and the pledge reclaimed. As for my grief — it is without end; and as for my night — it is sleepless, until God chooses for me your home in which you dwell. And your daughter will tell you how your community joined together to wrong her; so question her closely, and ask her how it was — and all this when your time is not long past, and your memory has not faded.

وَالْسَّلاَمُ عَلَيْكُمَا سَلاَمَ مُوَدِّع، لاَ قَال وَلاَ سَئم، فَإنْ أَنْصَرِفْ فَلاَ عَنْ مَلاَلَة، وَإِنْ أُقِمْ فَلاَ عَنْ سُوءِ ظَنٍّ بِمَا وَعَدَ اللهُ الصَّابِرِينَ.

“And peace be upon you both — the greeting of one who bids farewell, neither resentful nor weary: if I leave, it is not from weariness; and if I stay, it is not from doubting what God has promised the patient.”

— Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him, at the burial of Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra; Nahj al-Balagha, Sermon 202

Her grave was hidden by her own will.

More than a thousand years later, the graves at al-Baqi’ were levelled by somebody else’s.

One argument, more than a thousand years apart — and both are still visited.

She died seventy-five days after her father.

وُلِدَتْ فَاطِمَةُ عَلَيْهَا وَعَلَى بَعْلِهَا السَّلامُ بَعْدَ مَبْعَثِ رَسُولِ الله (صَلَّى اللهُ عَلَيْهِ وَآلِه) بِخَمْسِ سِنِينَ وَتُوُفِّيَتْ (عليها السلام) وَلَهَا ثَمَانَ عَشْرَةَ سَنَةً وَخَمْسَةٌ وَسَبْعُونَ يَوْماً وَبَقِيَتْ بَعْدَ أَبِيهَا (صَلَّى اللهُ عَلَيْهِ وَآلِه) خَمْسَةً وَسَبْعِينَ يَوْماً.

“Fatimah — upon her and upon her husband be peace — was born five years after the Messenger of God, God bless him and his family, was sent; and she passed away, peace be upon her, at the age of eighteen years and seventy-five days; and she remained after her father, God bless him and his family, seventy-five days.”

— Shaykh al-Kulayni’s own note opening the same chapter, al-Kafi, Volume 1

And when, in 1804 or 1805, the domes at Medina first came down, more than a thousand years had passed — and the people were still coming.

Remember the Swiss traveller at her mother’s grave in Mecca, its dome broken and not yet rebuilt:

They break the dome.

The people keep coming.

And here is what the people who kept coming were taught to say.

One of the Imams taught it; it is in al-Kafi, and its age is carried by the chain in Kamil al-Ziyarat.

When you come to the grave at al-Baqi’, you stand there, and you say this:

إِذَا أَتَيْتَ الْقَبْرَ الَّذِي بِالْبَقِيعِ فَاجْعَلْهُ بَيْنَ يَدَيْكَ ثُمَّ تَقُولُ السَّلامُ عَلَيْكُمْ أَئِمَّةَ الْهُدَى السَّلامُ عَلَيْكُمْ أَهْلَ التَّقْوَى السَّلامُ عَلَيْكُمُ الْحُجَّةَ عَلَى أَهْلِ الدُّنْيَا السَّلامُ عَلَيْكُمُ الْقُوَّامَ فِي الْبَرِيَّةِ بِالْقِسْطِ السَّلامُ عَلَيْكُمْ أَهْلَ الصَّفْوَةِ السَّلامُ عَلَيْكُمْ أَهْلَ النَّجْوَى أَشْهَدُ أَنَّكُمْ قَدْ بَلَّغْتُمْ وَنَصَحْتُمْ وَصَبَرْتُمْ فِي ذَاتِ الله وَكُذِّبْتُمْ وَأُسِي‏ءَ إِلَيْكُمْ فَعَفَوْتُمْ وَأَشْهَدُ أَنَّكُمُ الأَئِمَّةُ الرَّاشِدُونَ الْمَهْدِيُّونَ وَأَنَّ طَاعَتَكُمْ مَفْرُوضَةٌ وَأَنَّ قَوْلَكُمُ الصِّدْقُ وَأَنَّكُمْ دَعَوْتُمْ فَلَمْ تُجَابُوا وَأَمَرْتُمْ فَلَمْ تُطَاعُوا وَأَنَّكُمْ دَعَائِمُ الدِّينِ وَأَرْكَانُ الأَرْضِ وَلَمْ تَزَالُوا بِعَيْنِ الله يَنْسَخُكُمْ فِي أَصْلابِ كُلِّ مُطَهَّرٍ وَيَنْقُلُكُمْ فِي أَرْحَامِ الْمُطَهَّرَاتِ لَمْ تُدَنِّسْكُمُ الْجَاهِلِيَّةُ الْجَهْلاءُ وَلَمْ تَشْرَكْ فِيكُمْ فِتَنُ الأَهْوَاءِ طِبْتُمْ وَطَابَ مَنْبِتُكُمْ مَنَّ بِكُمْ عَلَيْنَا دَيَّانُ الدِّينِ فَجَعَلَكُمْ فِي بُيُوتٍ أَذِنَ الله أَنْ تُرْفَعَ وَيُذْكَرَ فِيهَا اسْمُهُ وَجَعَلَ صَلَوَاتِنَا عَلَيْكُمْ رَحْمَةً لَنَا وَكَفَّارَةً لِذُنُوبِنَا إِذَا اخْتَارَكُمْ لَنَا وَطَيَّبَ خَلْقَنَا بِمَا مَنَّ بِهِ عَلَيْنَا مِنْ وَلايَتِكُمْ وَكُنَّا عِنْدَهُ مُسَمَّيْنَ بِفَضْلِكُمْ مُعْتَرِفِينَ بِتَصْدِيقِنَا إِيَّاكُمْ وَهَذَا مَقَامُ مَنْ أَسْرَفَ وَأَخْطَأَ وَاسْتَكَانَ وَأَقَرَّ بِمَا جَنَى وَرَجَا بِمَقَامِهِ الْخَلاصَ وَأَنْ يَسْتَنْقِذَهُ بِكُمْ مُسْتَنْقِذُ الْهَلْكَى مِنَ الرَّدَى فَكُونُوا لِي شُفَعَاءَ فَقَدْ وَفَدْتُ إِلَيْكُمْ إِذَا رَغِبَ عَنْكُمْ أَهْلُ الدُّنْيَا وَاتَّخَذُوا آيَاتِ الله هُزُواً وَاسْتَكْبَرُوا عَنْهَا يَا مَنْ هُوَ قَائِمٌ لا يَسْهُو وَدَائِمٌ لا يَلْهُو وَمُحِيطٌ بِكُلِّ شَيْ‏ءٍ لَكَ الْمَنُّ بِمَا وَفَّقْتَنِي وَعَرَّفْتَنِي مِمَّا ائْتَمَنْتَنِي عَلَيْهِ إِذْ صَدَّ عَنْهُمْ عِبَادُكَ وَجَهِلُوا مَعْرِفَتَهُمْ وَاسْتَخَفُّوا بِحَقِّهِمْ وَمَالُوا إِلَى سِوَاهُمْ فَكَانَتِ الْمِنَّةُ مِنْكَ عَلَيَّ مَعَ أَقْوَامٍ خَصَصْتَهُمْ بِمَا خَصَصْتَنِي بِهِ فَلَكَ الْحَمْدُ إِذْ كُنْتُ عِنْدَكَ فِي مَقَامِي هَذَا مَذْكُوراً مَكْتُوباً وَلا تَحْرِمْنِي مَا رَجَوْتُ وَلا تُخَيِّبْنِي فِيمَا دَعَوْتُ وَادْعُ لِنَفْسِكَ بِمَا أَحْبَبْتَ.

“When you come to the grave that is at al-Baqi’, set it before you; then say:

Peace be upon you, Imams of guidance. Peace be upon you, people of taqwa. Peace be upon you, the proof over the people of this world. Peace be upon you, who stand among creation with justice. Peace be upon you, people of the chosen purity. Peace be upon you, people of the intimate converse.

I bear witness that you conveyed, and counselled, and were patient in the cause of God; and you were called liars, and were wronged, and you forgave. And I bear witness that you are the rightly guiding, rightly guided Imams; that obedience to you is obligatory; that your word is the truth; that you called and were not answered, and commanded and were not obeyed; and that you are the pillars of the religion and the supports of the earth.

You never ceased to be under the eye of God: He carried you through the loins of every purified man, and moved you through the wombs of purified women. The ignorance of the Age of Ignorance did not stain you, and the trials of whims had no share in you. You were pure, and pure is the ground you grew from.

The Lord of the Judgement favoured us with you, and placed you in houses God has permitted to be raised, and His name to be remembered in them; and He made our blessings upon you a mercy for us and an atonement for our sins, when He chose you for us, and made our creation good by the favour He did us of your wilayah. And with Him we were named by your merit, acknowledging our faith in you.

And this is the station of one who has gone too far, and erred, and humbled himself, and confessed what he did, and who hopes by his standing here for deliverance — that through you the Rescuer of the perishing will rescue him from ruin. So be my intercessors; for I have come to you when the people of this world have turned from you, and taken the signs of God in mockery, and been too proud for them.

O You who stand and do not forget, who remain and are not diverted, who encompass all things: Yours is the favour, for You granted me success, and made known to me what You entrusted me with, when Your servants turned from them, and did not know them, and made light of their right, and inclined to others besides them. So the favour was Yours upon me, with peoples You singled out with what You singled me out with. Yours is the praise, since I am, with You, in this station of mine, remembered and written. Do not deprive me of what I hoped, and do not disappoint me in what I prayed.

And pray for yourself as you wish.”

— Shaykh al-Kulayni, al-Kafi, Volume 4, the first hadith of its chapter on visiting the graves at al-Baqi’; its age carried by the chain in Ibn Qulawayh, Kamil al-Ziyarat

In houses God has permitted to be raised.

That is the Qur’an’s own phrase, from the Chapter of Light, placed in the mouth of every visitor at al-Baqi’.

And Ayatollah Jawadi Amoli, may God protect him, says what kind of permission it is.

Not a permission of law — a permission of creation.

And the house to which He gave that permission, he says, no one can ruin.

يك اذن تشريعي است كه در سورهٴ مباركهٴ «حج» فرمود مسلمانها كه از مكّه به مدينه آمدند و حكومت تشكيل دادند و قدرت مركزي پيدا كردند به آنها اجازه دفاع داده شد ﴿أُذِنَ لِلَّذِينَ يُقَاتَلُونَ بِأَنَّهُمْ ظُلِمُوا﴾ (سورهٴ حج, آيهٴ 39) كه در سورهٴ مباركهٴ «حج» اين اذن تشريعي گذشت خدا اذن داد كه اينها بجنگند و از خودشان دفاع كنند در مكّه سخن از زد و خورد نبود فقط خورد بود به اصطلاح, سيزده سال در رنج بودند در مدينه كه حكومت مركزي شد از خودشان دفاع كردند اين مي‌شود اذن تشريعي اما فرمود اين اذنهايي كه من به حرم دادم به مسجد دادم اينها اذن تكويني است هيچ كس نمي‌تواند عظمت مسجد را عظمت حرم را عظمت حسينيه را عظمت سرزمين وحي را عظيمت بقيع را كم بكند ﴿فِي بُيُوتٍ أَذِنَ اللَّهُ أَن تُرْفَعَ﴾ وگرنه آن اذن تشريعي كه در هر خانه‌اي هست كدام خانه است كه خداي سبحان اذن تشريعي نداد حتي امر كرده به همه خانه‌ها و صاحب‌خانه‌ها امر كرده كه شما رفيع بشويد ذكر بگوييد عبادت كنيد ﴿أَقِيمُوا الصَّلاَةَ وَآتُوا الزَّكَاةَ﴾ (سورهٴ بقره, آيهٴ 43) همه اين كارها را دستور داده پس هيچ خانه‌اي نيست كه ذات اقدس الهي اذن تشريعي نداده باشد اما آن خانه‌اي كه اذن تكويني داد و احدي نمي‌تواند آن را ويران كند همين خانه‌هاست ﴿فِي بُيُوتٍ أَذِنَ اللَّهُ أَن تُرْفَعَ﴾ خب سرّ رفعتش چيست؟

“There is a legislative permission. In the blessed Surah al-Hajj He said that the Muslims who had come from Mecca to Medina, and formed a government, and gained a central power, were given permission to defend themselves: ‘Permission is given to those who are fought, because they have been wronged’ (Surah al-Hajj, verse 39). That legislative permission was discussed in the blessed Surah al-Hajj: God permitted them to fight and to defend themselves. In Mecca there was no talk of giving blows, only of taking them, so to speak; for thirteen years they suffered. In Medina, when there was a central government, they defended themselves. That is legislative permission. But He said: these permissions that I gave to the shrine, that I gave to the mosque — these are a permission of creation. No one can diminish the greatness of the mosque, the greatness of the shrine, the greatness of the husayniyya, the greatness of the land of revelation, the greatness of al-Baqi’ — ‘in houses God has permitted to be raised’. Otherwise, as for the legislative permission that every house has — which house is there to which God, Glorified is He, has not given legislative permission? He has even commanded all houses, and all householders, to be raised up: to remember, to worship — ‘establish the prayer and give the zakat’ (Surah al-Baqara, verse 43) — He has commanded all these things. So there is no house to which the Most Holy Essence of God has not given legislative permission. But the house to which He gave the permission of creation, and which no one can ruin — it is these very houses: ‘in houses God has permitted to be raised’. So what is the secret of their being raised?”

— Ayatollah Jawadi Amoli, Tasnim, lesson on Surah al-Nur (16 November 2011), my translation; the verse references in brackets are the lesson’s own footnotes

You can take the dome.

You cannot take that.

And the late Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, may God rest his pure soul, put the grief where it belongs.

The Household, he said, did not grieve that al-Baqi’ had no lamp.

The calamity was never the lamp.

The calamity was a community deprived of them.

چرا نباید سطح معرفت‌مان به حدی باشد که بفهمیم بزرگ‌ترین مصیبت برای جامعه اسلامی این بود که از برکات وجود اهل‌بیت محروم شدند؟!

“Why should the level of our understanding not be such that we grasp that the greatest calamity for the Islamic community was that it was deprived of the blessings of the very presence of the Ahl al-Bayt?!”

— Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, “We and the Knowledge of the Lofty Station of Sayyedah al-Zahra” (30 April 2013), my translation

So let us not make the grief smaller than it is by making it about stones.

She asked for her grave to be hidden, and it was.

The others were levelled, and they did not disappear.

And somewhere, in the dark she chose, is the daughter of the Messenger of God — and the people are still coming, and they still know the words.

Segue to Maqtal

Tonight we have stood at al-Baqi’ twice: once with the people who levelled it, and once with the people who kept coming.

And under that ground lies her eldest son.

Imam al-Hasan, peace and blessings be upon him, did not ask to be buried beside his grandfather.

He asked only to be brought near to him, so that he might renew his covenant with him.

And even that was refused.

Our maqtal tonight is for him.

And it is given in the voice of the one who carries every one of their griefs: the Imam of our Age.

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

Supplication

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

By Your prophets, peace and blessings be upon them all — every one of them sent to a people who did not want to hear him, and every one of them patient.

By Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions — who asked that his grave not be taken as a place of worship, and who taught his people to greet the dead.

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

O God, tonight we pray the prayer the Commander of the Faithful gave his own men for the army that was fighting them:

O God, spare our blood and their blood, set right what is between us and them, and guide them out of their misguidance, so that whoever is ignorant of the truth may come to know it, and whoever is set upon error and aggression may turn back from it.

O God, make us people who describe and do not revile.
Make us people who can hear a hard history and leave without a stick.
Keep us from using Your true word for anything but the work You gave it.

O God, keep us on Your straight path — and keep us from the one who sits in wait there.
When we are confused, let us know that we are confused.
And when our brothers are confused, make us gentle with them, as Your friend was gentle.

O God, have mercy on the dead of Karbala and of Medina and of Samarra, and on everyone who lies under ground that was levelled.
And have mercy on our own dead, and on every grave that has no one left to visit it.

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

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

O God, hasten the relief of Your friend and the son of Your friend — the Imam of our Age, may our souls be his ransom and may God hasten his return.
Let us be among those he would be pleased to find here when he comes — and when he comes, let us be standing at al-Baqi’ with him.

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

Amen, O Lord Sustainer of the Universes

Amen, O Most Merciful of the Merciful

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

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

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

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

A Verse About People Who Loved a Prophet Too Much

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

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

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

And look at what follows it.

It is not about a statue.

It is not about a stone.

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

It is about people who loved a prophet.

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

They loved him truly.

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

Read it again and see what it actually forbids:

The prohibition is not on the affection.

The prohibition is on the claim.

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

Not to have a thing.

To go past it.

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

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

It is a people who could not stop raising one.

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

Is that a verse about somebody else?

The Sentence That Has No Good Answer

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

We did that honestly.

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

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

Not a soft version.

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

Here it is.

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

It is not a slogan.

A serious person can say that sentence and mean it.

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

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

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

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

A speed limit.

A dose on a bottle.

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

Every one of them has a case that breaks it.

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

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

I think they are wrong.

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

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

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

I am going to answer it by producing our limits.

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

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

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

… تِلْكَ حُدُودُ اللَّهِ فَلَا تَقْرَبُوهَا …

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

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

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

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

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

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

The edge of a blade.

The penalty that holds transgression back.

The boundary of a property.

And the word for iron.

That is the vocabulary God chose for a limit.

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

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

And the Book does not leave the word abstract.

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

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

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

Notice where God plants that phrase.

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

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

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

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

So hold that against

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

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

There is exactly one being in existence with no limit.

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

One — and read what He does.

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

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

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

He owns everything in the heavens and the earth.

Nothing outside Him constrains Him, and nothing could.

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

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

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

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

Our limits are older than the objection.

They are sharper than anything the objector has ever proposed.

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

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

Yes. It can.

It has — among people our Imams disowned.

We said so first.

Video of the Majlis (Sermon/Lecture)

Recap — What We Carry Forward

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

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

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

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

What we carry forward is short.

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

From the seventy-fifth, three things.

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

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

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

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

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

That is the night.

Three Corrections, One Afternoon

He Said It Himself, About Himself

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

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

Saying number one hundred and seventeen.

It is one line long.

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

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

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

Listen to which one he names first.

Not the enemy.

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

Those men exist and he knows exactly who they are.

He names the admirer first.

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

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

Two ditches.

One road.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He did not quietly choose one and bury the other.

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

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

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

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

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

That is the house we are from.

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

And Then He Gives You the Road

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

And the speech is addressed to the Khawarij.

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

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

They are the extreme on the far side.

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

And he is standing in front of them.

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

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

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

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

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

The great mass is everybody they had written off.

Do you see what he has done?

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

Read the two clauses again.

Same verb.

Same destination.

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

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

He did not stop at too much.

He said the love carries you somewhere.

The problem is not only the size of the affection.

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

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

It means the question is not only

It is

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

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

Two ditches, one road.

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

I did not build it.

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

A Man Walks In to Check on Somebody Else

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

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

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

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

He has been sent.

He is a delegate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One clause.

Both named.

Neither spared.

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

So Kamil arrives with a question in his pocket.

It is not his question.

It is theirs.

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

Keep that in mind.

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

The First Correction: Before He Has Even Sat Down

He is shown in.

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

And a thought goes through him.

You know this thought.

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

And the Imam smiles at him.

Not a rebuke.

Not anger.

He smiles, and he pulls back his sleeve.

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

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

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

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

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

And then the four words.

هذا لله وهذا لكم.

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

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

That is the whole correction.

Four words in Arabic.

The man came to audit somebody else’s doctrine.

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

I am going to leave that there.

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

The Second Correction: The Question He Never Asked

Now the unasked one.

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

Be honest about what that thought is.

It is not stupidity and it is not malice.

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

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

It is a child’s voice.

The report says he looked about four years old.

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

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

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

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

And then the voice tells him who does enter.

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

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

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

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

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

Who swear by his right.

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

They are in.

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

They are in.

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

This is not

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

What it says is something narrower and much harder.

That is not an answer about doctrine.

That is an answer about you.

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

Remember the first saying I read you tonight.

Excessive love is in that sentence.

It is the first thing in it.

Nobody is telling you the love is the safe direction.

The love has to arrive somewhere true.

That is all.

And there is still a door.

The Third Correction: What He Actually Came to Ask

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

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

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

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

Not

Not

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

He does not settle it by authority.

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

He grounds it in a verse.

وَمَا تَشَاءُونَ إِلَّا أَنْ يَشَاءَ اللَّهُ …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And notice what he has just certified.

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

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

So count them.

One man.

One afternoon.

Three corrections.

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

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

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

It was the least urgent thing in the room.

And Now the Hard Edge

I have given you a scene.

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

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

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

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

And he answers in four words.

الْغُلَاةُ كُفَّارٌ وَالْمُفَوِّضَةُ مُشْرِكُونَ

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

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

I want you to hear what has just happened.

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

It is the accusation.

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

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

Not about outsiders.

Not about another community.

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

The accusation is not new to us.

The category is not new to us.

And we did not need to be told.

And he does not stop there.

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

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

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

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

Go back over the first ten.

Sitting.

Mixing.

Eating.

Drinking.

Keeping up the relationship.

Marrying into them, or marrying them into you.

Trusting them.

Leaving something in their keeping.

Believing what they tell you.

That is not a list of crimes.

That is a list of ordinary life.

He is not describing how you join them.

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

And then the eleventh.

Half a word.

Not wrote a book defending them.

Not joined them.

Half a word of help.

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

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

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

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

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

Five.

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

He is not saying those five are fine.

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

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

Haruriyya.

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

So think about where we are.

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

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

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

That is not a community being soft on its own.

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

That is our own house.

That is our own book.

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

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

We wrote it.

We kept it.

We still read it.

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

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

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

And what the Imam says is this.

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

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

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

And that last word is not the Imam’s.

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

He is not hiding anything from you.

He is telling you there is more.

Sit with the first clause.

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

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

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

Not

— nobody does that.

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

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

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

You have the shape of it.

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

Guard your young people.

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

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

He wrote a small book on exactly this, called

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

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

The exaggerators were not random.

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

They clustered around him.

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

The pull was real.

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

Lessons for Our Time

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

Look back at everything I have just read you.

Every single text was ours.

Our compiler.

Our Imams.

Our collections.

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

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

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

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

We worked that out.

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

We could have quietly lost those pages.

Traditions do that.

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

We kept them.

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

You are required to know where they already are.

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

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

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

It is a museum piece.

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

I am not naming anybody.

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

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

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

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

Do not go too far.

Do not say too much.

Be careful.

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

He named two edges.

He put them in the same sentence.

He gave them the same verb.

And then he told you where to stand.

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

The test is not only

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… تِلْكَ حُدُودُ اللَّهِ فَلَا تَعْتَدُوهَا …

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

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

The line runs both ways.

It always did.

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

Three men made three vows.

One swore he would never sleep at night.

One swore he would never break his fast by day.

One swore he would never marry.

Not one of them was running from God.

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

And the report names the three.

Bilal.

Uthman ibn Mazh’un.

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

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

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

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

So nobody in this room gets to file what follows under

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

She said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coarse haircloth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Same cloth.

Two men.

Opposite verdicts.

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

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

The cloth was never the point.

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

It is this:

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

That is the whole problem.

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

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

Only the destination tells them apart.

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

It does not mean love them a medium amount.

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

That is not moderation.

That is just a smaller version of the second ditch.

It is a road.

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

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

It is that you would like to arrive.

Where the Line Actually Falls

Look Again at Who the Verse Is About

Come back to the verse we opened on.

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

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

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

Last week we spent an entire evening inside that house.

We read their books.

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

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

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

I am asking you to look at a mechanism.

Here is a community that loved a prophet.

Genuinely loved him.

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

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

That is the mechanism.

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

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

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

One Author, One Book, Two Verdicts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asking through somebody.

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

No caveat, no warning label, no defensive paragraph.

It sits in a list.

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

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

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

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

Same author.

Same commentary.

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

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

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

And here is what he says on them:

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

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

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

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

The same man.

The same book.

The same word — tawassul, both times.

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

He is not contradicting himself.

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

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

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

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

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

Two Men at the Same Grave

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

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

And I know exactly what that sounds like.

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

But notice who said it.

That is not a defence lawyer for our community.

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

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

And I want you to feel which direction this cuts.

An invisible line is not a licence.

An invisible line is harder.

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

That is not a comfortable thing to be handed.

It is just true.

And the Limit Comes from the Book, Not from Me

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

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

So where is the line?

Not from me.

From the Qur’an.

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

And what they say is not we hate God.

Nobody in the Qur’an says that.

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

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

There is no denial of God in it anywhere.

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

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

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

They are not denying God.

They have Him at the top.

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

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

It is uncomfortable because the sentence is so reasonable.

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

You might even agree with it.

Now watch how God answers.

He does not say

That answer was available and He did not give it.

Intercession is in the Qur’an.

It is not in dispute.

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

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

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

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

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

The limit is not on the asking.

The limit is on the granting.

You may ask.

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

Asking somebody God loves to ask for you is asking.

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

As though a transaction had been completed.

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

Because he is not the one who grants.

And neither are you.

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

And He Does Not Leave It with Them

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

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

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

Allamah Tabataba’i does not read it that way.

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

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

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

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

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

And this is what he says on it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons for Our Time

Lesson Three — The Gesture Is Not the Test

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

The test is not

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

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

The test is the grammar of the request.

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

And here is the form of words.

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

That is it.

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

Now test it against the pagans in the verse.

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

Not

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tonight, look at the greeting.

The words in your mouth can be almost identical.

The grammar underneath them is not.

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

Ask what happens if the answer is no.

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

Does the relationship survive it?

Because if it does, you were asking.

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

Nobody can see that from outside.

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

You can see it.

That is not a loophole.

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

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

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

The objection said we have no limits.

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

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

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

It is a way of ending the conversation.

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

Be able to say what you are not doing.

Not

Not

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

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

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

You have handed somebody a stick to hit you with.

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

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

That is what a real limit looks like.

Not a shield.

A handle, offered to somebody else.

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

It protects you from yourself in twenty years.

Because nobody goes past the limit in a single evening.

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

It is not a decision.

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

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

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

They were not describing their enemies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Turn, and It Is Aimed at Us

The Verse They Point At

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

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

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

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

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

Do not look away from that.

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

I am not going to answer it yet either.

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

Our Own Commentator, First

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

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

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

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

Stop there.

Nobody in that verse ever said the word.

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

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

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

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

And notice where that reading comes from.

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

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

And an Imam Said It Harder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They followed them.

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

Because you were about to reach for one.

You were about to say:

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

They did not fast for a rabbi.

They did not pray to a monk.

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

The Sentence This Whole Evening Was Built to Deliver

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

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

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

It is about obedience.

And that lands on us.

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

On a congregation that follows a marja’.

Let it land.

I am not going to catch it for you.

And Now the Words I Have Been Reading Past

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

Not lords.

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

Obedience is everywhere.

You obey a doctor.

You obey the man who teaches you to drive.

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

An authority that answers to nobody above it.

A word that is the end of the matter.

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

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

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

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

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

Hear the possessive.

Not a proof.

Not the proof.

Not an authority standing on its own feet.

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

And the same sentence names the next link itself:

That is a link in a chain.

The verse is describing a chain that stopped.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It answers it with a man.

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

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

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

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

And the man gives his defence.

And his defence is not a bad one.

He says this:

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

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

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

Sit with that for a moment.

Take his defence at its strongest.

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

It still did not save him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now — the verse he quotes is about parents.

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

Read the rest of it:

… فَلَا تُطِعْهُمَا ۖ وَصَاحِبْهُمَا فِي الدُّنْيَا مَعْرُوفًا …

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

— Qur’an, Surah Luqman #31, Verse 15

Both halves.

One verse.

About the first human authority any of us ever knows.

Nobody in this room hears that verse and concludes

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

Which is exactly why nobody should hear tonight as

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

It was not ignorance.

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

He knew.

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

What he had was deference.

So Here Is the Test, and It Is Two Questions

You cannot check your marja’s reasoning.

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

So the test is not

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

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

Not whether you follow him.

Whether the chain goes anywhere above him.

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

And if the honest answer is

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

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

Not a subtle thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Look at the phrase in the middle of it:

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

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

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

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

Word for word.

One says:

The other says:

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

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

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

A counterfeit is never exposed by suspicion.

Suspicion catches nothing and exhausts everybody.

Lessons for Our Time

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

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

A scholar is not a holy man.

He is an educated one.

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

Think about how obvious this is with a doctor.

Your doctor knows medicine.

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

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

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

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

His sciences are not medicine.

They exist to bring a person nearer to God.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But listen to whom the verse means.

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

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

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

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

Whatever he is wearing.

So nearness to God is the aspiration.

It is not a guarantee.

And it is not something you can see.

His learning, other scholars can test.

His conduct, you can watch for yourself.

Nobody can.

Very often, not even he can.

I have heard it with my own ears.

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

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

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

That was not modesty for effect.

You could feel it when they said it.

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

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

And I am labouring this for a reason.

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

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

The garb is not a verdict.

It never was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is an enormous amount.

Do not raise your voice at him.

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

Defend him when he is maligned.

Conceal his faults.

That is more deference than most of us actually give.

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

Same construction.

Same chapter.

One after the other.

And that one uses the word:

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

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

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

There it is.

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

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

He described the relationship differently.

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

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

The teacher is the route.

The knowledge is God’s.

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

This is what he owes the people he teaches:

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

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

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

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

More accountable.

Not less.

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

Follow them.

Surah Luqman said of your parents:

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

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

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

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

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

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

It ends on four words we usually skip:

God knows.

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

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

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

What he does, you can see.

Where he stands with God, you cannot.

You only get to refuse the one thing.

Lesson Six — Displacement, Again

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

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

It is the same word, at a different address.

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

The Close

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

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

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

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

Three sentences, and then I will stop.

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

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

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

Conclusion — Key Takeaways

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

The first. Keep going.

Nothing I said tonight told you to stop.

Not one sentence of it.

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

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

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

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

Out loud.

In your own words.

Short enough to say to somebody at work.

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

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

Ask yourself the first question of the test.

Answer it honestly, tonight, on your own.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the Imam went.

He left the house he had lived in.

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

And he travelled without his family.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Months of it.

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

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

He was not being sent into exile.

That is the thing I keep coming back to.

Exile you can name.

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

He was being sent into promotion.

And when he arrived, he was not imprisoned.

He was elevated.

He was made heir apparent to the caliphate.

His name was struck on the coinage.

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

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

Now put that beside what you heard tonight.

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

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

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

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

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

Do you see it?

The honouring was the weapon.

Not a cell.

Not a chain.

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

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

And he knew.

He said so before it happened.

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

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

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

Ghurba is not simply abroad.

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

And he is not describing a fear.

He is describing an outcome.

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

He died at Tus.

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

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

That is the dar madi’a.

The house of desolation.

It was not a metaphor.

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

Because the report does not stop with the burial.

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

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

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

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

He speaks to whoever will visit him.

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

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

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

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

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

He does not want to be left alone.

And they come.

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

He said a land of estrangement.

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

Segue to the Maqtal

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

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

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

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

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

Our maqtal tonight is for him.

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

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

Supplication

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

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

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

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

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

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

O God, keep us on the road.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen, O Lord Sustainer of the Universes

Amen, O Most Merciful of the Merciful

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

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

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

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

The Charge Is Older Than We Are

Last week we spent an hour answering a charge.

We took it seriously.

We did not wave it away.

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

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

It is older than Islam.

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

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

And here is the part that should interest us most.

They did not run from the question.

They wrote it down.

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

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

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

And so should we.

What I Am Not Going to Say

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

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

That is a bad argument.

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

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

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

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

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

Three things.

The first — that the question is old.

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

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

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

Every one of them.

They did not say do whatever you like.

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

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

That is the night.

Video of the Sermon (Majlis/Lecture)

Recap — What We Carry Forward

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

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

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

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

What we carry forward is short.

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

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

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

And tonight, the third sentence.

We were not the first to ask.

The Question, As It Actually Arrives

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

Nobody walks up to you and says:

What happens is this.

You are standing at a shrine.

Or you are showing somebody a photograph of one.

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

That is the question.

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

Now.

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

It feels right to you.

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

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

Feelings are not an argument.

Not theirs, and not ours.

So how do you settle it?

You ask what follows.

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

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

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

Why We Are About to Read Their Books

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

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

And after that I am going to open the Gospel.

A Shia majlis.

On a Wednesday night.

Reading the Talmud.

You are entitled to ask me why.

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

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

What Every Human Being Is Made Of

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

The oldest covenant on earth.

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

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

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

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

And he answers:

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

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

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

Hear the last clause.

Not the believer only.

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

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

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

I am not extending a courtesy to somebody outside.

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

Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus — and You

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

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

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

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

One religion.

Ordained.

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

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

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

And How We Are Told to Differ

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

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

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

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

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

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

He is describing a method.

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

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

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

That is what we are doing tonight.

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

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

I am not telling you the religions are the same.

We differ.

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

Where the roads part, they part.

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

And that is not my opinion.

That is a command, with a verse behind it.

They Asked It, and Then They Tested It

Before I Read You a Word of It

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

The Torah is the Book.

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

The Talmud is the second thing.

And that is their word for it, not mine.

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

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

Not the revelation.

The working out of the revelation.

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

And here is the thing I want you to hold.

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

That it had to live in the mouth.

Carried by men, from men.

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

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

Sit with that for a moment.

It Keeps the Argument It Rejected

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

It writes down the argument it rejected.

By name.

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

It keeps the losing answer.

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

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

Which means this.

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

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

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

It is a record of an argument.

What I Told You on the Tenth Night of Muharram

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

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

That was true.

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

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

Both of those are true at once.

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

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

And We Would Not Survive That Test Either

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

We have that kind of literature too.

Transmitted.

Argued over.

Graded and re-graded.

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

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

We know that.

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

So that is what the Talmud is.

Now let me show you what is in it.

Before I Open Their Book — Our Own

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So the two men are in our Book.

Not as a footnote.

God Himself describes them —

That is a testimonial.

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

And now, who were they?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Caleb, son of Jephunneh.

One of twelve chiefs.

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

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

A Man Peels Off from the Group

Twelve are sent ahead into the land.

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

Two do not.

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

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

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

— Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 34b

Hear what he does.

He leaves the group.

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

He goes down at the graves.

And he speaks to them.

He does not ask them for anything.

He asks them to ask.

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

He is the one who got it right.

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

And Look Where It Comes From

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

It is not a story somebody remembered.

It is a grammar problem.

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

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

Singular.

He came.

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

One letter.

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

Somebody stopped and said — wait.

Why does it go from they to he?

And out of that comes the whole report.

Now.

Where have you seen that before?

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

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

That is the same method.

I am not telling you they are like us.

I am telling you something narrower and more interesting.

The method is the same method.

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

And Then They Ask Our Question Out Loud

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

A fast day.

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

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

And the Talmud asks why.

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

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

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

Let that sentence sit in the room for a second.

That is our question.

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

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

I could give you a number.

There is a number available and it sounds impressive.

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

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

I will give you the men.

They are named in the text.

Rabbi Levi bar Lahma and Rabbi Hama bar Hanina.

You can look them up.

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

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

That is the claim.

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

And Then — Listen — They Test It

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

They have two answers on the table.

The first:

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

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

We are dust the same as this dust.

It is an act of humbling, and it is aimed at God, and the dead in it are scenery.

The second:

We come out to the graves because the people in them can ask, and we are asking them to ask.

Two completely different theologies of the same walk.

And the Talmud does not settle it by which one feels more pious.

It asks:

What would actually change?

Show me a case where the two answers give you different instructions.

And it finds one, immediately.

Follow it through.

If the reason is we are before Thee as dead — then any grave will do.

Dust is dust.

You can make that statement about yourself standing anywhere there are graves.

But if the reason is that the departed ones should pray for mercy in our behalf — then it matters enormously whose graves they are.

You do not go to the graves of people who would not be asking.

One question.

And now the two answers are no longer two moods.

They are two different sets of instructions for a real morning in a real place, and you can look at them and decide.

That Is Exactly What We Did Last Week

My dear brothers and sisters.

That is exactly what we did last week.

Last week I read you the Imam of the Shafi’is, al-Nawawi, on the question of building over a grave, and I showed you that he did not settle it by how it felt.

He asked what follows — whose land is it, is it endowed, is it public, what would the ruling be if the answer were yes.

He was not reading this.

He had never seen this page and would not have wanted to.

He arrived there by himself.

Because that is what happens when serious people take a question seriously.

They stop asking how it feels and they start asking what follows.

And It Reaches the Book of Law

And one last thing, and then I am done with this house.

This did not stay in the study hall.

It went into the code of law.

Not into a book of piety or a book of stories — into the book a man opens to find out what he is supposed to do.

ויש מקומות נוהגין לילך על הקברות ולהרבות שם בתחנות

“And there are places where the custom is to go to the graves, and to pray much there.”

— Rema, gloss on Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chayim 581:4

In a code of law.

As custom.

Recorded plainly, without apology and without embarrassment.

Somebody asked the question.

Somebody wrote the question down.

Somebody wrote down both answers, and the name of the man who gave the answer they did not take.

And somebody tested it against a real case.

And at the end of all of that it entered the law as a custom in some places.

That is a house that was not afraid of its own question.

Lessons for Our Time

The Ones Who Took It Seriously Always Attached a Limit

Here is the first thing to carry.

Every house that took this question seriously answered it with a limit attached.

Not one of them said:

Not one of them said:

They said — here is what this is, and here is what it is not, and here is where the line falls.

The Talmud’s line fell at whose graves you are standing at.

Al-Nawawi’s line fell at whose land you are building on.

Different houses, different lines, and every single one of them a line.

Now think about what that does to the objection.

Because the objection, when you strip it down, is an objection to carelessness.

It is the fear that somebody, somewhere, has stopped noticing the difference between honouring a man and worshipping him.

And that fear is not stupid.

I have said so before and I will say it again.

There are people who are careless about it, and some of them are ours.

But look at what the evidence actually shows.

Carefulness is the mark of every house that took this question seriously.

The carefulness is the tradition.

The carelessness is the departure from it.

So when somebody accuses you of carelessness, the answer is not to get loud.

The answer is to be careful — visibly, out loud, with your limits stated where people can hear them.

You do not answer a charge of carelessness by being offended.

You answer it by being careful.

A Question You Can Write Down Is a Question You Are Not Afraid Of

And here is the second, and it is smaller and it will stay with you longer.

A question you can write down is a question you are not afraid of.

We wrote ours down last week.

In front of you.

In its strongest form, with nothing filed off it, and I did not stand up here and pretend the objection was stupid, because it is not stupid.

And theirs is written down in their book too — and next to it, kept, is the answer they did not take.

With the name of the man who gave it, so that you can go and check whether he was right.

Think about what kind of confidence that takes.

To write down the argument against yourself.

To preserve it accurately.

To hand your grandchildren the sharpest version of the case you rejected, and trust them to look at it properly.

That is not the behaviour of people with something to hide.

Now turn it around.

The people in trouble are never the ones who write the question down.

The people in trouble are the ones who cannot let it be asked.

The ones who go quiet, or loud, or personal.

The ones who tell you the question itself is a sign of bad character — bad Akhlaq, so that nobody in the room has to hear the answer.

Watch for that.

In others, and — this is the one that matters — in yourself.

Because if you ever find that there is a question about your own religion that you would rather was not asked in front of you, that is not a sign that the question is dangerous.

That is a sign that you have not done the reading.

And Our Own Books Say It First

I Am Not About to Tell You What Christians Do

Let me be very clear about what is coming, because there is an easy misunderstanding available here and I want to close it before we start.

I am not about to tell you what Christians do.

I am not going to show you a practice in another community and invite you to feel better about ours.

That would be the same bad argument I refused at the start of the evening, dressed differently, and you would be right to catch me at it.

I am about to read you what is in our books.

Our narrations.

Our compilations.

The ones our own scholars transmitted and our own scholars argued about.

And what is in them is about a prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, whom we love and whom we are commanded to love, and about what God told him to do.

The Christian material comes at the end, and it comes as a footnote, not as evidence.

Everything that follows is ours.

God Tells a Prophet to Stand at a Grave

Shaykh al-Mufid records, in his Amali, a revelation from God to Jesus son of Mary, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return.

Four instructions in one breath.

Listen to the company the fourth one keeps.

يَا عِيسَى، هَبْ لِي مِنْ عَيْنَيْكَ الدُّمُوعَ، وَمِنْ قَلْبِكَ الْخُشُوعَ، وَاكْحُلْ عَيْنَيْكَ بِمِيلِ الْحُزْنِ إِذَا ضَحِكَ الْبَطَّالُونَ، وَقُمْ عَلَىٰ قُبُورِ الْأَمْوَاتِ فَنَادِهِمْ بِالصَّوْتِ الرَّفِيعِ لَعَلَّكَ تَأْخُذُ مَوْعِظَتَكَ مِنْهُمْ، وَقُلْ: إِنِّي لَاحِقٌ بِهِمْ فِي اللَّاحِقِينَ

“O Jesus, make Me a gift of the tears of your eyes, and of the humility of your heart. And anoint your eyes with the kohl-stick of sorrow when the idle ones laugh. And stand at the graves of the dead and call to them with a raised voice — perhaps you will take your admonition from them. And say: I am joining them, among those who join.”

— Shaykh al-Mufid, al-Amali, on the authority of Imam Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him

Notice what it is grouped with.

Tears.

Humility of the heart.

The kohl-stick of sorrow, drawn along the eye, while the idle ones are laughing.

And then — in the same list, in the same voice, as the fourth of four —

That is not a legal instruction.

Nobody legislates the tears of a man’s eyes.

This is the register of intimacy — of what God asks from someone He has drawn close.

Standing at a grave and calling out belongs, in God’s own ordering, with weeping and with humility and with refusing to laugh along with the idle.

Read the clause itself again, slowly, and hear what is actually being asked.

Not walk past them. Not glance. Stand.

Not think about them.

Not reflect upon them silently, in the privacy of your own heart, in a manner unlikely to attract comment.

And then speak to them directly, in the second person, about yourself:

Now.

Whatever standing at a grave and calling out is — it cannot be the thing the charge says it is.

Because God is the one giving the instruction, and He is giving it to a prophet, and He is not instructing a prophet to commit the one sin the whole of prophethood exists to abolish.

You do not have to take my word for the ruling. Just hold the two things side by side.

On the one side, a charge that says speaking at a grave is the beginning of idolatry.

On the other side, God telling a prophet to go and speak at a grave, out loud.

They cannot both be describing the same act.

And Now the Verse You Are About to Think Of

Now some of you — and I mean this as a compliment — some of you have already got a verse in your mouth.

I know which one.

Let us go and get it, because I am not going to leave it sitting in the room unsaid while I move on to something more comfortable.

وَمَا يَسْتَوِي الْأَعْمَىٰ وَالْبَصِيرُ

وَلَا الظُّلُمَاتُ وَلَا النُّورُ

وَلَا الظِّلُّ وَلَا الْحَرُورُ

وَمَا يَسْتَوِي الْأَحْيَاءُ وَلَا الْأَمْوَاتُ ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ يُسْمِعُ مَن يَشَاءُ ۖ وَمَا أَنتَ بِمُسْمِعٍ مَّن فِي الْقُبُورِ

“And the blind and the seeing are not equal.

Nor the depths of darkness and the light.

Nor the shade and the scorching heat.

And the living and the dead are not equal. Indeed, God causes to hear whom He wills — and you are not one who makes those in the graves hear.”

— Qur’an, Surah Fatir (the Chapter of the Originator) #35, Verses 19, 20, 21 and 22

That is the verse.

It is a real verse and it is put to us constantly, and the person putting it to us is usually not being dishonest.

They are reading what is in front of them.

So let us read what is in front of them properly — all of it, not the last clause on its own.

Look at the shape of the passage.

It is a list.

Four pairs, one after another, in a single breath.

Now — nobody in the history of this religion has ever read the first pair as a statement about eyesight.

Nobody has ever said that God is here comparing the visually impaired unfavourably with the sighted.

Every reader who has ever lived understands immediately that the blind means the one who will not see what is in front of him, and the seeing means the one who will.

Nobody reads the second pair as a remark about the hours of daylight.

Nobody reads the third pair as advice about standing in the shade.

Three similitudes.

And then, in the same list, in the same breath, in the same grammatical shape — the fourth.

And suddenly, we are told, this one is about actual corpses.

Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, in al-Mizan, says what a careful reader would say.

He reads the whole run as one run — the blind and the seeing, the darkness and the light, the shade and the heat, the living and the dead — as four similitudes for one thing: the believer and the one who has closed himself.

And on those in the graves he says:

وَالْمُرَادُ بِهِمُ الْكُفَّارُ الْمَطْبُوعُ عَلَىٰ قُلُوبِهِمْ

“And what is meant by them is the disbelievers upon whose hearts a seal has been set.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah Fatir #35, Verse 22

They are the living — walking around, eating lunch, perfectly healthy — with something sealed over the heart, so that the message goes in at the ear and arrives nowhere.

And the verse is a consolation to the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions.

It is God telling him: this is not your failure.

You cannot force it.

You are not the one who makes a man hear who has decided not to.

The verse is not about a cemetery.

It is about a man in the third row who has made up his mind.

At His Cousin’s Grave

And one more from our own books, and this one I have been waiting all evening to give you.

In al-Kafi, in Volume Three, in the Book of Funerals — the same book from which we took the first point of the seventy-third session — there is a report about Jesus son of Mary, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, and I will give it to you whole, because the end of it is the part that matters and I do not want you hearing only the first half.

He goes to the grave of Yahya ibn Zakariyya — John the Baptist, peace and blessings be upon him.

His cousin.

إِنَّ عِيسَى ابْنَ مَرْيَمَ جَاءَ إِلَىٰ قَبْرِ يَحْيَى بْنِ زَكَرِيَّا وَكَانَ سَأَلَ رَبَّهُ أَنْ يُحْيِيَهُ لَهُ، فَدَعَاهُ فَأَجَابَهُ وَخَرَجَ إِلَيْهِ مِنَ الْقَبْرِ، فَقَالَ لَهُ: مَا تُرِيدُ مِنِّي؟ فَقَالَ لَهُ: أُرِيدُ أَنْ تُؤْنِسَنِي كَمَا كُنْتَ فِي الدُّنْيَا. فَقَالَ لَهُ: يَا عِيسَى، مَا سَكَنَتْ عَنِّي حَرَارَةُ الْمَوْتِ وَأَنْتَ تُرِيدُ أَنْ تُعِيدَنِي إِلَى الدُّنْيَا وَتَعُودَ عَلَيَّ حَرَارَةُ الْمَوْتِ؟ فَتَرَكَهُ فَعَادَ إِلَىٰ قَبْرِهِ

“Jesus son of Mary came to the grave of Yahya ibn Zakariyya, and he had asked his Lord to bring him to life for him. So he called him, and he answered him, and came out to him from the grave. He said to him: what do you want from me? He said to him: I want you to keep me company, as you used to in the world. He said to him: O Jesus — the heat of death has not yet settled away from me, and you want to return me to the world and have the heat of death come back upon me? So he left him, and he returned to his grave.”

— al-Kafi, Volume 3, the Book of Funerals

Now.

There is more in that than I can open tonight, so let me take only what belongs to this evening.

That is the word.

That is the word we spent a whole evening on — the warmth of company, the particular comfort of not being alone, the thing one person gives another simply by being there.

Two weeks ago we found it in a narration about what the dead receive from the living.

And here it is in the mouth of a prophet — asking for it in the other direction. At a grave. Out loud.

And then hear the answer, because the answer is not what a story invented to comfort us would have said.

He says no.

Not out of coldness.

He had loved him in the world and there is no suggestion he has stopped.

He says no because coming back would cost him something, and he has already paid it once, and he does not want to pay it again.

Think about what has to be true for that sentence to be sayable.

He is conscious.

He is present.

He can be called, and he can hear, and he can answer.

He remembers the world and what he was to this man in it.

And he has an interest of his own — something he wants and something he would rather avoid — which means he is not an object in somebody else’s story.

He is still a person.

I am not going to draw the conclusion for you.

Sit with it.

What the Angels Say, and Where the Prophet Said It

One more, and it is the only thing in this Point that is not from our own books — so before I give it to you, hear what our own books say about the same act.

There is a verse describing what the angels say when they come in upon the patient in the Garden.

سَلَامٌ عَلَيْكُم بِمَا صَبَرْتُمْ ۚ فَنِعْمَ عُقْبَى الدَّارِ

“Peace be upon you for what you endured — and how excellent is the final home.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Ra’d (the Chapter of Thunder) #13, Verse 24

Now hear where those words were said on this earth.

وَبَلَغَنِي أَنَّ النَّبِيَّ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَآلِهِ كَانَ إِذَا أَتَى قُبُورَ الشُّهَدَاءِ قَالَ: السَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ بِمَا صَبَرْتُمْ فَنِعْمَ عُقْبَى الدَّارِ

“And it has reached me that the Prophet, may God bless him and his family, when he came to the graves of the martyrs, would say: peace be upon you for what you endured, and how excellent is the final home.”

— Ibn Qulawayh, Kamil al-Ziyarat, on the authority of Imam Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him

Sit with the shape of that.

The greeting that the angels give in Paradise — the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions, brought it out to a field outside Madina and said it to men in the ground.

Not about them.

To them.

In the words the angels use.

So going to the graves of people who were killed for refusing, and speaking to them, and keeping the place — that is not a thing we picked up from anybody.

It is in our Book and it is in our Prophet’s mouth.

And They Kept the Day

And now the one that is theirs, and I give it to you as theirs.

On the fifth night of Muharram I told you about Polycarp — the old bishop of Smyrna who would not say the words that would have saved him, and who was burned for it.

What I did not dwell on then, I will name now.

His people gathered his bones afterwards.

They described them as more valuable than jewels.

They buried them in a place they chose.

And they said that they would gather there, on the anniversary, in gladness, to remember the ones who had gone before and to prepare the ones who were coming.

An annual gathering.

At a tomb.

On a date.

Written down by the people who did it, without the slightest sense that they were doing anything that needed defending.

That is all.

I am not going to build on it.

I mention it only so you know that the pattern is not narrow.

Lessons for Our Time

God Told a Prophet to Stand at a Grave and Speak

The first is one sentence and it does not need my help.

God told a prophet to stand at a grave and speak out loud.

That is in our books.

Not in theirs — in ours.

Transmitted by our own compilers, in a collection our own scholars have used for a thousand years.

So whatever visiting is, it cannot be the thing the charge says it is.

I am not re-arguing the seventy-fourth session tonight.

We did that work and it stands.

I am adding one stone to it: that the practice the charge calls a novelty and a slide into idolatry turns out to be something God instructed a prophet to do, in plain language, with a raised voice.

And notice the company He put it in.

Tears.

Humility of the heart.

Sorrow drawn along the eye like kohl, while the idle are laughing.

And then — go and stand at the graves and call out.

That is where God filed it.

Not under law, and not under danger, and certainly not under the things a servant must be warned away from.

He filed it with the tears.

So when the charge comes — and it will come, and it will probably come from someone who means well — you now know something about the shape of the answer.

The answer is not how dare you.

The answer is not a list of scholars’ names delivered at speed.

And the answer is certainly not everyone does it, which I refused at the start of this evening and which I refuse again now.

The answer is:

Hold that lightly.

Do not become pleased with yourself about it — being right is the least interesting thing a person can be, and a man can be right about a grave and wrong about nearly everything else.

But hold it.

And the Verse They Quote at You Says the Opposite

And the second, and this one you will use.

The verse people quote at you says close to the opposite of what they think it says.

— and those in the graves, on the reading of Allamah Tabataba’i, are the sealed-hearted living.

The fourth of four similitudes in a single run, three of which nobody has ever taken literally.

Now.

When you say this to somebody, say it the way I have just said it.

Do not say it in triumph.

Do not say you have been misreading your own Qur’an — even if it is true, especially if it is true.

The moment a person feels humiliated, the argument is over and you have won nothing.

Say it the way you would want it said to you if you had been the one reading past it.

Name the commentator.

Give the reason.

Show them the four pairs and let them see it for themselves.

And then stop talking.

Because the argument that convinces is never the one you win.

It is the one they finish in their own head after you have gone home.

And there is one more thing in this, and it is bigger than the verse.

Ask yourself how the misreading happened.

Because it did not happen through malice, and it is important that you understand that, or you will handle the next person badly.

It happened because somebody took the last clause of a list and read it on its own.

That is all.

There was no conspiracy.

Four pairs in a single breath, and somebody quoted the fourth one, and once you have only the fourth one in front of you, the plain meaning of the words is exactly what they said it was.

Now — that is the most ordinary error in the world, and we make it constantly.

We do it with hadith.

We take the sentence that suits us and leave the sentence before it where it lies.

We do it with each other — we hear the fourth clause of what our brother said, the one that stung, and we build a whole opinion of him out of it while the three clauses that framed it go unremembered.

And we do it with ourselves.

A man will take one thing he did on one bad afternoon and read it as the summary of his life, when it was the fourth item in a list, and God has the whole list.

So when you correct somebody’s reading of this verse, correct the method, gently, not just the verse.

Say: look at the run.

Look at what it sits inside.

Because if they learn that — if they learn to read the list and not the clause — you have given them something far more valuable than a point about a cemetery.

You have given them a way of reading that will protect them from a hundred arguments you will never be there for.

The Turn, and It Is Aimed at Us

We Did Not Read You All of It

On the tenth night of Muharram, in this hall, we read the Seven Woes.

You will remember them.

The long sequence in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus son of Mary, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, turns on the religious establishment of his own community and says woe to you seven times over.

We read them because of what was done to him, and to his mother, and to those who followed him.

We did not read you all of them.

There are two verses in the middle of that sequence that I left where they were, because they did not belong to that night.

They belong to tonight.

And Again — Our Own Book First

Same discipline as Point 1.

Before I read you a word of the Gospel, hear the charge in our own Qur’an, in our own language, about the same community and the same conduct.

God is speaking to the Children of Israel, and He reminds them what they were given before He says what they did with it.

وَلَقَدْ آتَيْنَا مُوسَى الْكِتَابَ وَقَفَّيْنَا مِن بَعْدِهِ بِالرُّسُلِ ۖ وَآتَيْنَا عِيسَى ابْنَ مَرْيَمَ الْبَيِّنَاتِ وَأَيَّدْنَاهُ بِرُوحِ الْقُدُسِ ۗ أَفَكُلَّمَا جَاءَكُمْ رَسُولٌ بِمَا لَا تَهْوَىٰ أَنفُسُكُمُ اسْتَكْبَرْتُمْ فَفَرِيقًا كَذَّبْتُمْ وَفَرِيقًا تَقْتُلُونَ

“And We gave Moses the Book, and We followed him up with messengers after him. And We gave Jesus son of Mary the clear signs, and We supported him with the Holy Spirit. Is it then that every time a messenger came to you with what your souls did not desire, you grew arrogant — and a party you denied, and a party you kill?”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Baqarah (the Chapter of the Cow) #2, Verse 87

That is our Book.

Not somebody else’s report of what they said about themselves — God’s own words, in the Qur’an we recite, about prophets sent and prophets killed.

So when I open the Gospel in a moment and you hear something that sounds hard, understand: you have already heard it.

We recite it.

It is on our own page and it has been for fourteen centuries.

And now hear the same charge in the mouth of the prophet it was made through.

What the Sixth Woe Actually Says

Οὐαὶ ὑμῖν, γραμματεῖς καὶ Φαρισαῖοι ὑποκριταί, ὅτι οἰκοδομεῖτε τοὺς τάφους τῶν προφητῶν καὶ κοσμεῖτε τὰ μνημεῖα τῶν δικαίων, καὶ λέγετε· Εἰ ἤμεθα ἐν ταῖς ἡμέραις τῶν πατέρων ἡμῶν, οὐκ ἂν ἤμεθα αὐτῶν κοινωνοὶ ἐν τῷ αἵματι τῶν προφητῶν· ὥστε μαρτυρεῖτε ἑαυτοῖς ὅτι υἱοί ἐστε τῶν φονευσάντων τοὺς προφήτας.

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.”

— The Gospel according to Matthew, Chapter 23, Verses 29, 30 and 31

Now.

I want to do something careful here, and I want you to watch me do it, because this passage gets misused in both directions and I am not going to misuse it in either.

Read What He Is Actually Angry About

Here is what he does not say.

He does not say: stop building tombs for the prophets.

He does not say that building the tomb is the sin.

He does not say the sepulchre should come down.

He does not say the garnishing is idolatry, or that the money would be better spent, or that the righteous need no monument.

Go back and look.

The building is simply there.

It is described.

It is assumed.

It is the setting of the rebuke, not its object.

And I want you to feel how odd that is, given who is speaking.

This is a man who, three verses earlier, has just compared these same people to whited sepulchres — beautiful outside and full of dead men’s bones within.

He is not shy about tombs as an image.

He has just used one as an insult.

So if the building of tombs for prophets were itself the offence, this is the moment.

The image is already in his mouth.

Two more words and the sixth woe becomes woe to you, because you build.

He does not say it.

He says because you build the tombs of the prophets — and then keeps going, into a different clause entirely, and the sentence does not come to rest until it reaches something the builders are saying.

So what is he angry about?

He tells us, in the very next breath, and he is completely explicit.

That is the sin.

It is the sentence that comes out of the mouth while the hands are doing the building.

The tomb-builder standing at the tomb of a murdered prophet, telling himself and anyone listening that he would have been on the right side.

That had he been there, on that morning, when it actually cost something — he would have stood with the prophet and not with the men who killed him.

And Jesus, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, looks at that man and says:

And the Verb Is Our Word

And I want you to hear the word he uses, because it is our word.

ὥστε μαρτυρεῖτε ἑαυτοῖς ὅτι υἱοί ἐστε τῶν φονευσάντων τοὺς προφήτας.

“Wherefore ye be witnesses unto yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets.”

— The Gospel according to Matthew, Chapter 23, Verse 31

The word that the whole Shahada series was built on — the word that does not mean victim and never did, the word that means witness, and that comes to mean the one who paid for his testimony with his body.

You bear witness.

Against yourselves.

Think about where else we have met this shape.

When you stand at a shrine and recite a ziyarah, what is the form of the words?

It is not a request.

It is not, mostly, a petition.

Go and look at the text of the Ziyarah of Hani ibn Urwa, which we read together.

Ash-hadu.

I bear witness.

Three times over.

A ziyarah is a formula of testimony.

That is its grammar.

You go to the grave and you give evidence.

Go and read one slowly.

You will find the same verb again and again — that you established the prayer, that you gave the alms, that you commanded the good and forbade the evil.

Each clause opening on I bear witness.

That is not praise.

Praise is a different grammar.

Praise says how beautiful you were.

Testimony says this is what happened, and I am putting my name to it.

And a witness can be examined.

That is what a witness is for.

Nobody takes testimony and files it unread.

The whole point of giving evidence is that somebody is going to weigh it, and weigh you, and ask whether the man giving it is the kind of man whose word means anything.

So when you stand at that grave and say ash-hadu — you have entered yourself into the record.

And the Gospel here is saying exactly that, and then adding the part we would rather not hear: evidence can go either way.

The man who builds the tomb is testifying.

He cannot help it.

The building is a statement, in stone, and everybody can read it.

He has put his name to a claim about which side he is on.

The only question the Gospel asks is what his testimony actually establishes.

And It Was Not Us Who Drew This Parallel

Now.

I could stop here, and you could go home thinking that this was a Shia preacher who went looking in somebody else’s book for a clever verse about somebody else’s community.

So let me take that away from you, and let me take it away using the one voice in this tradition that nobody in this room is going to argue with.

At Mina, during the Hajj, before the caravan and before the road and before any of what we weep for in Muharram — Imam Husayn ibn Ali, peace and blessings be upon him, stood up in front of the scholars and the notables of the Muslim world, who had come from every city for the pilgrimage, and he gave them a diagnosis.

We gave a whole night to that sermon in the Shahada series and I am not going to give it again.

I want one thing from it tonight.

The way he opened.

He did not open with an argument.

He opened by reciting verses — and the choice of verses is the argument, and the second one is why I have kept this until the end of the evening.

The first was this.

لَوْلَا يَنْهَاهُمُ الرَّبَّانِيُّونَ وَالْأَحْبَارُ عَن قَوْلِهِمُ الْإِثْمَ وَأَكْلِهِمُ السُّحْتَ ۚ لَبِئْسَ مَا كَانُوا يَصْنَعُونَ

“Why do the rabbis and the scholars not forbid them from their sinful speech and their consuming of what is unlawful? How wretched is what they have been doing.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Ma’idah (the Chapter of the Table Spread) #5, Verse 63

A verse about the religious authorities of an earlier community, who saw what was being done in front of them and said nothing.

And he reads it out to the religious authorities of his community, sitting in front of him, in Arabic they understood perfectly.

Now the second.

لُعِنَ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا مِن بَنِي إِسْرَائِيلَ عَلَىٰ لِسَانِ دَاوُودَ وَعِيسَى ابْنِ مَرْيَمَ ۚ ذَٰلِكَ بِمَا عَصَوا وَّكَانُوا يَعْتَدُونَ

كَانُوا لَا يَتَنَاهَوْنَ عَن مُّنكَرٍ فَعَلُوهُ ۚ لَبِئْسَ مَا كَانُوا يَفْعَلُونَ

“Cursed were those who disbelieved among the Children of Israel, by the tongue of David and of Jesus son of Mary. That was because they disobeyed and were transgressing.

They did not forbid one another from the wrong that they did. How wretched is what they were doing.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Ma’idah (the Chapter of the Table Spread) #5, Verses 78 and 79

Stop there.

My dear brothers and sisters — what do you think we have been reading for the last ten minutes?

The Qur’an tells us that Jesus, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, cursed a portion of his own community, and it tells us exactly what for:

And the Gospel of Matthew shows him doing it.

Seven times over.

And the sixth of those seven is the one I read you tonight — the men at the tombs of the murdered prophets, saying

The Qur’an reports the curse.

The Gospel preserves the words.

And Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him, picks up the Qur’anic verse about it — and turns it on the scholars of the Muslims.

That is three layers, and I did not stack them.

He did.

What He Said to the Scholars in Front of Him

And then he says the sentence that I want you to carry out of this hall tonight.

وَأَنْتُمْ تَرَوْنَ عُهُودَ اللَّهِ مَنْقُوضَةً فَلَا تَفْزَعُونَ وَأَنْتُمْ لِبَعْضِ ذِمَمِ آبَائِكُمْ تَفْزَعُونَ وَذِمَّةُ رَسُولِ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَآلِهِ مُحْتَقَرَةٌ

“And you see the covenants of God broken, and you are not alarmed — while for some of the covenants of your fathers you are alarmed. And the covenant of the Messenger of God, may God bless him and his family, is held in contempt.”

— Imam Husayn ibn Ali, peace and blessings be upon him, the Sermon at Mina; Tuhaf al-Uqul of al-Hasan ibn Ali ibn Shu’bah al-Harrani

Do you hear where we started tonight?

We opened this evening on a covenant.

The oldest one.

The one taken from every soul before any of us had a body —

— and I told you it is what every human being is made out of, the believer and the disbeliever alike.

And here is the grandson of the Prophet, at Mina, telling the scholars of his community that they can watch that covenant broken in front of them and feel nothing, while a slight against their own family name would have them on their feet.

He did not think the warning was about somebody else.

And then he went to Karbala.

Lessons for Our Time

Ask Which One You Are

So the first lesson is the hardest one in the session, and I want it to land plainly.

The Gospel does not rebuke people for building the tombs.

It rebukes them for building tombs for prophets their own fathers killed — and then congratulating themselves at the graveside.

Now ask yourself the question, and ask it honestly, because nobody else in this room can hear your answer.

Because we build.

We build beautifully.

We spend money we do not have on tile-work and calligraphy and silver, and I am not going to stand here and say that is wrong, because I have spent the whole evening showing you it is not.

But the building is not the test.

The test is what you would have done on the morning.

Not what you feel when the noha is playing and the lights are low and everyone around you is weeping.

Anyone can feel that.

Feeling it costs you nothing and proves nothing, and the men in that verse felt it too — that is precisely why they were building.

The test is what you do on a Tuesday, when the person being wronged in front of you is nobody’s idea of a martyr, and standing up for them will cost you a friendship or a contract or your standing among people whose opinion you value.

That is the morning.

It comes to all of us, in small sizes, constantly.

And the honest truth is that most of us find out on that morning that we are not quite who we thought we were at the shrine.

And the Man Who Asked That Question Went to Karbala

The second is one clause, and then I will stop.

The man who asked that question of his own community asked it at Mina.

And then he went to Karbala.

I am not going to preach Karbala to you now.

We have a whole life for that, and we have the nights ahead.

I only want you to notice that he did not ask it and go home.

Every System God Gave Can Be Corrupted

And the third.

This is new, and it is the beginning of something rather than the end of it, so I am going to open the door and then close it again, and we will come back to it properly.

Everything I have shown you tonight has a shadow behind it, and the shadow is this:

Now — hear me carefully, because this sentence can be misheard in about four different ways.

That is not a slur against anybody’s religion.

It is not me saying their religion went wrong and ours did not.

It is Satan’s stated plan.

He announced it, out loud, at the beginning, and God recorded the announcement in the Book so that we would know.

قَالَ فَبِمَا أَغْوَيْتَنِي لَأَقْعُدَنَّ لَهُمْ صِرَاطَكَ الْمُسْتَقِيمَ

“He said: because You have let me go astray, I will surely sit in wait for them on Your straight path.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-A’raf (the Chapter of the Heights) #7, Verse 16

Look at where he says he will sit.

Not on the crooked path.

Not in the tavern and the casino and the places we have all agreed are dangerous.

He sits on the road that leads to God.

Because there is no point sitting anywhere else — the people he wants are the ones who are already walking.

You do not need to ambush a man who is not going anywhere.

So corruption, when it comes, does not come to people who have left the road.

It comes to people who are on it.

Who are praying.

Who are building.

Who are certain they are doing God’s work.

And it takes them a few degrees off, and then a few more, and they never once feel themselves turning.

Now — if that is true, how would you ever know?

You are not a scholar.

You cannot audit somebody’s theology.

Somebody stands in front of you with a beard and a turban and a thousand citations and tells you this is God’s command, and what exactly are you supposed to do with that?

God has given us a test that does not require a seminary.

إِنَّ اللَّهَ لَا يَظْلِمُ مِثْقَالَ ذَرَّةٍ ۖ وَإِن تَكُ حَسَنَةً يُضَاعِفْهَا وَيُؤْتِ مِن لَّدُنْهُ أَجْرًا عَظِيمًا

“Indeed, God does not wrong by the weight of an atom. And if there is a good deed, He multiplies it, and gives from Himself a great reward.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Nisa (the Chapter of Women) #4, Verse 40

Not by the weight of an atom.

Not a little, not in a good cause, not as a regrettable necessity, not for a greater outcome later.

So here is the test, and a child can apply it.

When a man oppresses, and tells you he is doing God’s work — you do not need to be a scholar to know.

God does not oppress.

The oppression is the answer.

Whatever else may be true about that man’s learning and his lineage and his following, the thing he is doing is not from God, because God does not do it.

And I want to leave you with what dhulm — oppression —actually is, because we have flattened it into a political word and it is not first a political word.

Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i defines it in one clause, and he does it while explaining a verse about the Day of Judgement — this Day, no soul will be wronged at all, and you will not be recompensed except for what you used to do.

وَلَا يُتَصَوَّرُ مَعَ ذَٰلِكَ ظُلْمٌ، لِأَنَّ الظُّلْمَ وَضْعُ الشَّيْءِ فِي غَيْرِ مَوْضِعِهِ، وَتَحْمِيلُ الْعَامِلِ عَمَلَهُ وَضْعُ الشَّيْءِ فِي مَوْضِعِهِ ضَرُورَةً

“And no wrong is conceivable along with that — because wrong is the putting of a thing somewhere other than its place, and the loading of the doer with his own deed is the putting of a thing in its place, necessarily.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah Ya-Sin #36, Verse 54

Hear both halves of that, because he has given us the whole thing in one breath.

Wrong is a thing put where it does not belong.

And justice — this is the half we never say — is a thing put where it does belong.

On that Day, each man is handed exactly his own deed and nothing else.

That is not God being lenient and it is not God being severe.

That is a thing arriving at its own place.

So dhulm is displacement.

That is all it is.

Which means it starts long before anyone has any power.

It is in the word you place where a different word belonged.

It is in the attention you give where it was not owed and withhold where it was.

It is nearer to sin than to politics, and it is why a man can be an oppressor in his own house before he has ever oppressed a nation.

That is the door.

I am closing it now, because it needs a night of its own and it is going to get one.

But keep it in the back of your mind for the rest of this series, and notice — please notice — that I have not named a single community tonight.

Because if this lesson does not obviously include us, then I have not finished teaching it.

The Close

So we have been in three houses tonight, and I want to put down what we found in each of them in as few words as I can.

The question is old.

Older than us, older than our Book, asked by men who had never heard of us and would not have recognised us.

The answers came with limits attached.

Every serious house that asked it attached one.

The carefulness is the tradition; the carelessness is the departure.

And the only people that the Book and the Gospel and the Talmud between them agree in warning are the ones who honour the dead beautifully and would not have stood beside them while they were alive.

That is the whole night.

Conclusion — Key Takeaways

Three things to take home, and I will not re-argue any of them.

The first.

You settle it by asking what follows from it.

The men in Ta’anit did that, al-Nawawi did that, and neither of them had ever heard of the other.

When somebody asks you why do you do that — the answer is not because it feels right to me.

The answer is: here is what I believe about it, here is what follows from what I believe, and here is the line I will not cross.

The second.

God instructed a prophet to stand at a grave and call out with a raised voice.

The verse quoted against us, read in its own run, turns out to be about the living.

We are not borrowing a defence from another house tonight — we are noticing that other houses arrived independently at something our own books already say.

And the third, which is the one I want you to be uncomfortable about on the way home.

The Gospel does not rebuke the building.

It rebukes the sentence said while building —

And the first man to turn that warning on his own community’s scholars was Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him, at Mina, using a verse God had revealed about the scholars of an earlier people.

He did not think it was about somebody else.

Neither should we.

Eulogy — Yahya ibn Zakariyya (John the Baptist)

Two Boys, and Nobody Had Carried Either Name

An old man is praying in a chamber, alone, and asking God for something he has no business asking for at his age.

And God answers him.

يَا زَكَرِيَّا إِنَّا نُبَشِّرُكَ بِغُلَامٍ اسْمُهُ يَحْيَىٰ لَمْ نَجْعَل لَّهُ مِن قَبْلُ سَمِيًّا

“O Zechariah, We give you glad tidings of a boy whose name is Yahya (John). We have not made for him, before this, any namesake.”

— Qur’an, Surah Maryam (the Chapter of Mary) #19, Verse 7

Think about how strange that is to say about a baby.

God is announcing a child, to a father who has waited a lifetime, and the detail He chooses to give is that nobody has ever been called this before.

Of all the things that might be said about a boy — that he will be righteous, that he will be a prophet, that he will bring you joy, all of which God does say elsewhere — the first distinguishing mark given here is that the name is new.

Nobody had carried it.

He was the first thing of his kind.

And What Our Own House Kept About It

And now let me give you the narration that our own house has kept about that phrase, because Imam Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him, was asked about it and he did not answer about Yahya alone.

لَمْ يَجْعَلِ اللَّهُ لَهُ مِنْ قَبْلُ سَمِيًّا: الْحُسَيْنُ بْنُ عَلِيٍّ لَمْ يَكُنْ لَهُ مِنْ قَبْلُ سَمِيًّا، وَيَحْيَى بْنُ زَكَرِيَّا لَمْ يَكُنْ لَهُ مِنْ قَبْلُ سَمِيًّا، وَلَمْ تَبْكِ السَّمَاءُ إِلَّا عَلَيْهِمَا أَرْبَعِينَ صَبَاحاً. قَالَ: قُلْتُ: مَا بُكَاؤُهَا؟ قَالَ: كَانَتْ تَطْلُعُ حَمْرَاءَ وَتَغْرُبُ حَمْرَاءَ

“’God had not made for him, before this, any namesake’ — Husayn ibn Ali, there had been no namesake for him before; and Yahya ibn Zakariyya (John the son of Zechariah), there had been no namesake for him before. And the sky did not weep except for these two, for forty mornings. He said: I asked, what was its weeping? He said: it would rise red, and set red.”

— Ibn Qulawayh, Kamil al-Ziyarat, the chapter on the weeping of the heavens and the earth

Two boys.

Separated by centuries and a language and a desert.

Neither of them had a name before he was given it, and neither of them has been repeated since in the way that matters.

And one sky, that had not wept before and would not weep again, wept for both.

I have nothing to add to that image and I am not going to try.

What He Was Given, and What It Cost Him

He was a boy, and God addressed him as a man.

يَا يَحْيَىٰ خُذِ الْكِتَابَ بِقُوَّةٍ ۖ وَآتَيْنَاهُ الْحُكْمَ صَبِيًّا

وَحَنَانًا مِّن لَّدُنَّا وَزَكَاةً ۖ وَكَانَ تَقِيًّا

وَبَرًّا بِوَالِدَيْهِ وَلَمْ يَكُن جَبَّارًا عَصِيًّا

“O Yahya (John), take the Book with strength. And We gave him judgement while yet a boy.

And tenderness from Us, and purity. And he was God-fearing.

And dutiful to his parents, and he was not a tyrant, disobedient.”

— Qur’an, Surah Maryam (the Chapter of Mary) #19, Verses 12, 13 and 14

And then, immediately, the word that undoes any picture you might have been forming of a hard man.

Tenderness from God, given to him as a gift, alongside the strength.

Not instead of it.

The same boy who was told to take the Book with strength was given tenderness out of God’s own presence, and was dutiful to his parents, and was not a tyrant.

Those are the two halves of a witness, and we do not often hold them together.

We can manage strength without tenderness — that is easy and there are a great many people doing it.

We can manage tenderness without strength — that is comfortable and there are more.

He was given both, as a child, and he carried both into a room with a king in it.

And That Is Why We Are Told to Go

وَسَلَامٌ عَلَيْهِ يَوْمَ وُلِدَ وَيَوْمَ يَمُوتُ وَيَوْمَ يُبْعَثُ حَيًّا

“And peace be upon him the day he was born, and the day he dies, and the day he is raised alive.”

— Qur’an, Surah Maryam (the Chapter of Mary) #19, Verse 15

Three days named.

And the middle one is named without being described.

God does not tell us here what happened on it.

He tells us only that peace is upon him on it — the same peace as on the day he was born, the same peace as on the day he will be raised.

I am going to leave that day where God left it, for a few more minutes.

But hear what the verse does.

It sends peace upon him.

Not about him.

Upon him — addressed, delivered, to a person, on a day.

And that is the whole of what we have been doing all evening.

That is what a man does when he stands at a grave and speaks.

He is not performing an emotion.

He is not decorating a building.

He is delivering something to somebody, in the second person, because he has been told that it arrives.

Caleb went to Hebron and said

Jesus, may our souls be his ransom, and may God hasten his return, stood at his cousin’s grave and said

God told him to stand there and call out with a raised voice.

And the sky, which has wept for two men only, rose red and set red for forty mornings for a boy whose name nobody had carried.

That is why we are told to go.

Segue to the Maqtal

There is a man sitting in front of Imam Sadiq, peace and blessings be upon him, and he has a question about going to a grave.

Not this grave.

Another one.

And the answer he gets will contain the name of the boy we have just been speaking about — because the Imam does not answer him about one man alone either.

Let us go and sit with them.

Maqtal (Lamentation) for the Fifteenth Session of the Architecture of Guidance

Supplication

In His Name, the Lord of the Martyrs and the Truthful

O God, send blessings upon Muhammad and the family of Muhammad.

O God, we thank You for the verse at the door tonight — that You ordained one religion, and enjoined it upon Noah and Abraham and Moses and Jesus son of Mary, may our souls be his ransom, and may You, our beloved Lord, hasten his return — and upon us.
And we ask You to make us worthy of standing in that line rather than merely claiming it.

O God, we ask You for the martyred leader, Imam Sayyed Ali Khamenei — may You rest his pure soul — that You raise his station, and gather him with those he loved, and accept from him what he gave.

O God, protect the living leader, Imam Sayyed Mujtaba Khamenei — may You protect him — and steady his hand, and put barakah in his years.

O God, we ask You for a careful tongue.
Keep us from the argument that wins and convinces nobody.
Keep us from the cleverness that leaves a person smaller than we found them.
And when we are wrong — and we will be wrong — let us be the kind of people who write the correction down next to the mistake, with our name on it.

O God, we ask You for the morning.
Not for the feeling at the shrine, which costs us nothing and which You did not ask us for.
For the Tuesday.
For the moment when somebody nobody will ever write about is being wronged in front of us and it will cost us something to say so.
Put us on the right side of that morning, O God, because we have stood at enough graves now to have run out of excuses.

O God, we ask You for everyone in this room who has honoured a dead person more easily than they could honour a living one.
Forgive us that.
It is most of us.

O God, hasten the relief of our master, the Imam of our Age — may our souls be his ransom — and let us be among those who serve him, and are witnesses at his side.

And until that day, let us be people who ask the question out loud, and write it down, and keep the answer we did not like beside it.

Amen, O Lord Sustainer of the Universes

Amen, O Most Merciful of the Merciful

And from Him alone is all ability and He has authority over all things.

ذَٰلِكَ وَمَن يُعَظِّمْ حُرُمَاتِ اللَّهِ فَهُوَ خَيْرٌ لَّهُ عِندَ رَبِّهِ ۗ وَأُحِلَّتْ لَكُمُ الْأَنْعَامُ إِلَّا مَا يُتْلَىٰ عَلَيْكُمْ ۖ فَاجْتَنِبُوا الرِّجْسَ مِنَ الْأَوْثَانِ وَاجْتَنِبُوا قَوْلَ الزُّورِ

حُنَفَاءَ لِلَّهِ غَيْرَ مُشْرِكِينَ بِهِ ۚ وَمَن يُشْرِكْ بِاللَّهِ فَكَأَنَّمَا خَرَّ مِنَ السَّمَاءِ فَتَخْطَفُهُ الطَّيْرُ أَوْ تَهْوِي بِهِ الرِّيحُ فِي مَكَانٍ سَحِيقٍ

ذَٰلِكَ وَمَن يُعَظِّمْ شَعَائِرَ اللَّهِ فَإِنَّهَا مِن تَقْوَى الْقُلُوبِ

“That — and whoever venerates the sanctities of God, it is better for him with his Lord. And the cattle have been made lawful to you, except what is recited to you. So shun the filth of idols, and shun false speech.

Upright towards God, not associating anything with Him. And whoever associates anything with God, it is as though he had fallen from the sky and the birds snatched him away, or the wind cast him down into a remote place.

That — and whoever venerates the signs of God, that is from the God-fearing of hearts.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Hajj (the Chapter of the Pilgrimage) #22, Verses 30, 31 and 32

Listen to the Order He Puts Them In

Three verses, one after the other, in the chapter of the Pilgrimage.

I want to read you nothing else for a moment.

I want you only to look at how they are arranged.

The first one opens with two words —

And then:

Veneration.

Holding something in honour because of what God has attached to it.

And before that verse is finished, He says:

Then the middle verse.

And then the image — and it is one of the most violent pictures in the whole Qur’an.

A man falls out of the sky.

The birds take him in the air.

Or the wind carries him off to somewhere remote and drops him.

That is what associating partners with God does to a person.

He is not corrected.

He is not warned.

He is snatched out of the air in pieces.

And then the third verse opens — and listen to it — with exactly the same two words as the first.

The same construction.

And the same verb: yu’azzim, he holds in honour.

And sitting in between them, wedged in the middle, is a man falling out of the sky.

Now. I am not going to tell you yet what any of that means.

We will spend an hour getting there properly.

I only want you to notice the arrangement, because the arrangement is doing something.

The Book has not laid out veneration and idolatry as two points on a single nervous scale, with a careful line drawn somewhere in the middle that you might accidentally step over.

It has put one on either side of the other.

It says venerate, then it shows you what shirk — polytheism — looks like, then it says venerate again — and it never once stops to reconcile the two or to reassure you that they are different things.

It does not seem to think they are the same kind of thing at all.

Hold that.

We are leaving it there for an hour, and we will come back to it.

What Is Said About You for Going

Last week we ended with an instruction.

We said: go.

We spent an evening on why people stand at graves, and what our own books say is happening when they do, and we ended by telling you that the going is not a weakness in you and it is not a failure of faith, and that you should go.

Tonight is the week you find out what is said about you for going.

Some of you have already had this said to your face.

By a cousin.

By somebody at work.

By a brother-in-law at a wedding who had found a video.

Some of you have read it in a comment under something you posted, from a stranger, phrased as unkindly as it is possible to phrase a thing.

And some of you did not have an answer.

You knew it was wrong.

You could feel that it was wrong.

But you could not say why it was wrong, and so you changed the subject, and then you thought about it in the car on the way home.

And I know how that conversation goes, because it is the same every time.

It does not go badly because you are wrong.

It goes badly because they have three sentences ready and you have none, and three ready sentences will beat an hour of being right every time.

So they say their piece, and you say that’s not what we do, and they say then why do you kiss it, and there is a pause, and somebody changes the subject, and everybody in the room privately decides that the one with the sentences won.

By the end of tonight you will have an answer, God willing.

I want to say one thing about the kind of answer it is going to be, because it governs everything that follows.

It is not going to be an argument you win.

It is going to be four texts — and three of the four come from outside our own tradition.

Two of them are in the books of the people making the objection.

And the point of having it is not so that you can use it on somebody.

The point is so that when it is said to you, you are not frightened, and you can answer kindly, and the person walks away having learned something instead of having been beaten.

That is the whole shape of the evening.

Let me now put the objection in front of you properly.

Video of the Sermon (Majlis/Lecture)

Recap — What We Carry Forward

We are in The Architecture of Guidance, and this is the 14th part of it.

And inside it we are working through a smaller sequence called The House Beside the Grave.

Tonight is the sixth of those, and there are eleven.

Eleven.

If you were counting ten, the count changed this week.

We found more in one of the subjects than would fit in an evening, and rather than rush it we gave it its own week.

You will have that week shortly, with His grace and His will.

Tonight is Wednesday the 16th of September 2026, and it is the 4th of Rabi al-Thani, of the year 1448.

What we carry forward is short.

We asked why a scholar would leave the capital of the Muslim world to live in a village.

We asked what happened when they burned his books, and what could not be burned.

We asked why Najaf — why that ground and no other.

And last week we asked why people go at all, and we found an answer in our own earliest collection:

And we ended on a phrase I want back in your hands tonight, because we are going to need it.

The Charge, Put Properly

The Objection, and I Am Not Going to Soften It

I am going to say the thing that is said about us.

I am going to say it in the strongest form I know, in the words the people who say it actually use, and I am not going to put a single soothing word around it.

I want you to hear it at full weight.

Because an objection that has been made gentle before it is answered has not been answered.

It has been avoided, and everybody in the room can tell.

Here it is.

You pray at graves.
You travel across the world to stand in front of a box of dead bones and you weep.
You have built domes over them and covered them in gold.
You kiss the metal.
You press your face against it.
You write letters and push them through the lattice.
You ask a dead man for a child, for a job, for a cure — things that only God gives.
You circle the tomb the way people circle the House of God.

You worship them.
That is the word they use — you worship them.
And you worship the grave itself: the stone, the marble, the silver, the shrine.
You have made a religion out of masonry.

And you did not invent this quietly in a corner.
You did it in the face of your own Prophet, peace be upon him, his family and righteous companions, who cursed those who took the graves of their prophets as places of prayer.
Who forbade the plastering of a grave and the building over it.
Who sent Ali himself — the man you love above every other companion — and commanded him: leave no raised grave without levelling it.

He told you not to do it.
He sent the one you follow to undo it wherever he found it.
And you have done it anyway, on a scale he could not have imagined, and you have called it love.

And the worst of it is that you have taught it to your children.
You take them at four years old and you lift them up so they can touch the silver, and you tell them to ask.
You have raised a generation who reach for a grave before they reach for God.

That is the charge.

And I want you to notice something about it before we go any further, because it will matter in about forty minutes.

That is not one accusation.

That is two, wearing the same coat.

One of them is:

You direct to a human being what belongs only to God.

The other is:

The object.

The stone.

The building.

The thing made by masons out of rock.

They are not the same claim.

They do not stand or fall together.

And by the end of tonight, one of them will have been answered by a scholar in the objector’s own school, and the other will have been answered by walking through a door.

But not yet.

First we read what the charge is built on, because it is built on something, and it is not built on nothing.

The Two Reports It Rests On

There are two narrations that carry almost the whole weight of this, and both of them are in Sahih Muslim, which is one of the two collections the Sunni tradition holds to be the soundest books it possesses.

The first is narrated from a man named Abu al-Hayyaj al-Asadi, who is reporting what he was sent to do — and he was sent by the Commander of the Faithful, Ali ibn Abi Talib, peace and blessings be upon him:

قَالَ لِي عَلِيُّ بْنُ أَبِي طَالِبٍ: أَلَا أَبْعَثُكَ عَلَىٰ مَا بَعَثَنِي عَلَيْهِ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ: أَنْ لَا تَدَعَ تِمْثَالًا إِلَّا طَمَسْتَهُ، وَلَا قَبْرًا مُشْرِفًا إِلَّا سَوَّيْتَهُ

“Ali ibn Abi Talib said to me: shall I not send you on the same errand that the Messenger of God, may God’s blessings be upon him, sent me on? That you leave no image without effacing it, and no raised grave without levelling it.”

— Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, Sahih Muslim, the Book of Funerals

And the second, from Jabir:

نَهَىٰ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ أَنْ يُجَصَّصَ الْقَبْرُ، وَأَنْ يُقْعَدَ عَلَيْهِ، وَأَنْ يُبْنَىٰ عَلَيْهِ

“The Messenger of God, may God’s blessings be upon him, forbade that a grave be plastered, or sat upon, or built over.”

— Muslim ibn al-Hajjaj, Sahih Muslim, the Book of Funerals

Those are real reports in a real book and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

One thing, said once, and then I am moving on.

The hadith that this objection leans on hardest — the one that is quoted at us most often, the one about levelling the raised grave — reaches the people who quote it through Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib, peace be upon him.

That is all.

I am not going to make anything of it.

I only want it noted.

The Man Who Answers This Is Not One of Ours

Now, we could spend the evening on our own scholars explaining these two reports to us.

And that would be a comfortable hour, and it would convince nobody in the world who was not already convinced, and you would not be able to use a word of it on Thursday.

So we are going to do something else.

We are going to answer this the way you would want a serious charge answered against anybody — not by finding a friendly witness, but by going to the most hostile competent source available and reading what it actually says.

We are going to read the standard commentary on Sahih Muslim, written by a scholar of the Sunni tradition, on these exact pages, and we are going to let him tell us what these two reports mean.

His name is Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi.

He was a jurist of the Shafi’i school, from Damascus, in the seventh century of the hijrah — and in the seventy-three sessions of this series I have never once mentioned him, which tells you how far outside our usual conversation he stands.

Most of you know one thing he wrote.

If you have ever been handed a small green book of forty hadith in a study circle, that was him.

That book is the least of what he did.

What he is actually known for, among people who work in that tradition, is this: al-Minhaj, his commentary on Sahih Muslim.

When a Sunni scholar wants to know what a hadith in Muslim means, this is the book he reaches for.

It has been the standard for seven hundred years.

The copy we are reading tonight was printed in Cairo, at the Egyptian Press at al-Azhar, first edition, in the year 1347 of the hijrah.

And he does not begin by defending anything.

He begins somewhere else entirely, thirty pages earlier, and I want to take you there first — because once you have heard it, you cannot hear the rest the same way.

First — Which Daughter

Before I read you that page I have to stop for one minute, because of something I am about to say that would confuse half this room if I said it without warning.

The report is about a funeral.

A daughter of the Prophet, may God’s blessings be upon him, his family and his righteous companions, has died, and the women of the household are washing her body.

And if I say that sentence and go no further, some of you will immediately think of Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, peace and blessings be upon her — and you will be confused, and rightly, because she did not die before her father.

She outlived him.

So let me tell you which daughter it is.

And I do not have to work it out, because al-Nawawi tells us himself, on that same page — and he tells us that his own tradition argued about it:

وَأَمَّا بِنْتُ رَسُولِ اللَّهِ صَلَّى اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِ وَسَلَّمَ هَذِهِ الَّتِي غَسَّلَتْهَا فَهِيَ زَيْنَبُ رَضِيَ اللَّهُ عَنْهَا، هَكَذَا قَالَهُ الْجُمْهُورُ. قَالَ الْقَاضِي عِيَاضٌ: وَقَالَ بَعْضُ أَهْلِ السِّيَرِ أَنَّهَا أُمُّ كُلْثُومٍ، وَالصَّوَابُ زَيْنَبُ كَمَا صَرَّحَ بِهِ مُسْلِمٌ فِي رِوَايَتِهِ الَّتِي بَعْدَ هَذِهِ

“As for this daughter of the Messenger of God, may God’s blessings be upon him, whom she washed — she is Zaynab, may God be pleased with her. This is what the majority said. Qadi Iyad said: and some of the biographers said that she was Umm Kulthum. And the correct view is Zaynab, as Muslim stated explicitly in the report that comes after this one.”

— Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi, al-Minhaj Sharh Sahih Muslim, Volume 7, printed page 3

It is Zaynab.

Now, there is a difference between us and them here, and I would rather put it in front of you plainly than let you trip over it.

In their books, the Prophet had four daughters — Zaynab, Ruqayyah, Umm Kulthum and Fatimah — and three of them died in his lifetime.

The position most of our scholars have held is that Sayyedah Fatimah, peace and blessings be upon her, is his daughter by birth, and that the other three were the children of Sayyedah Khadijah, peace and blessings be upon her, raised in the Prophet’s house and called his daughters in the ordinary Arabic of that time.

And that is not a strange way to speak, and the Qur’an itself does it.

When God lists the women a man may not marry, this is in the list:

وَرَبَائِبُكُمُ الَّاتِي فِي حُجُورِكُم مِّن نِّسَائِكُمُ الَّاتِي دَخَلْتُم بِهِنَّ

“And your stepdaughters who are in your care, from your wives to whom you have gone in.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Nisa (the Chapter of the Women) #4, Verse 23

The Book has a word for a child raised in your house who is not yours by birth, and it puts her in the list of those you may never marry — which is to say it treats her as family, in law, at the point where it costs something.

The relation is real and it is honoured.

Nobody in that century would have blinked at hearing them called his daughters.

Two things, and then we go back to the page.

The first is that this is not one tradition being careless and another being careful.

Look again at what we just read: their scholars could not agree whether it was Zaynab or Umm Kulthum.

Qadi Iyad records the disagreement and al-Nawawi settles it from the wording of the next report.

They are doing exactly what we do — working out who is who, from the texts, and disagreeing on the way.

And the second is that none of it touches the ruling.

Whoever she was, the Messenger of God took the cloth off his own body and gave it for her shroud, and al-Nawawi tells us why he did it.

That sentence survives the disagreement completely intact.

Which is the whole method of tonight, and now you have seen it done.

You can differ with a man about a fact, say so without heat, and still read his book honestly and take what is true in it.

Thirty-Three Pages Earlier, He Says the Strongest Thing in the Book

So: Zaynab has died.

The women are washing her body, and Umm Atiyya is among them.

And the Messenger of God, may God’s blessings be upon him, his family and righteous companions, hands them something of his own to shroud her in — his own waist-wrapper, the cloth he wore.

Al-Nawawi stops on that, and asks what the wisdom in it was.

And here is his answer:

وَالْحِكْمَةُ فِي إِشْعَارِهَا بِهِ تَبْرِيكُهَا بِهِ، فَفِيهِ التَّبَرُّكُ بِآثَارِ الصَّالِحِينَ وَلِبَاسِهِمْ

“And the wisdom in wrapping her in it was seeking blessing for her through it — so in this there is the seeking of blessing through the relics of the righteous and their clothing.”

— Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi, al-Minhaj Sharh Sahih Muslim, Volume 7, printed page 3

Sit with that for a second.

The word he uses is tabarruk.

It means to seek blessing through a thing because of what it has been near, or who it belonged to.

A cloth.

A place.

A trace.

Now look at what kind of sentence that is.

Everything we are about to read from him on pages 36 and 37 is going to be permissive —

That is a jurist ruling on the edges of behaviour.

This sentence is not that.

This sentence is positive.

He is not tolerating tabarruk.

He is not conceding it.

He is naming it as the wisdom that the Messenger of God was acting on when he handed over his own cloth for Zaynab’s shroud.

And the generalisation is his, not mine.

He does not say

He says

Plural.

As a category.

He has taken one act and stated the principle underneath it.

Now, I have to draw a line here, sharply, and then we move on.

What we have just read is tabarruk — seeking blessing through a thing associated with the righteous.

That is one question.

It is not tawassul — asking a person to intercede for you with God.

That is a different question, with different texts and different arguments, and it is not tonight’s.

I am not going to let the two of them slide into each other, because that is exactly how this conversation usually goes wrong, and it usually goes wrong on our side.

Tonight is the place.

Not the asking.

The asking has its own evening and it is coming, God willing.

A Hand’s Width of Earth

Now to the pages themselves.

Printed page 36, and the running head across the top of it reads

This is the page that comments on the report from Abu al-Hayyaj — the one about the raised grave.

Here is the question that hangs on it.

Because the way the objection uses it, a raised grave is a dome.

A shrine.

A building.

Something with a roof on it.

Here is al-Nawawi:

فِيهِ أَنَّ السُّنَّةَ أَنَّ الْقَبْرَ لَا يُرْفَعُ عَلَى الْأَرْضِ رَفْعًا كَثِيرًا وَلَا يُسَنَّمُ، بَلْ يُرْفَعُ نَحْوَ شِبْرٍ وَيُسَطَّحُ، وَهَذَا مَذْهَبُ الشَّافِعِيِّ وَمَنْ وَافَقَهُ. وَنَقَلَ الْقَاضِي عِيَاضٌ عَنْ أَكْثَرِ الْعُلَمَاءِ أَنَّ الْأَفْضَلَ عِنْدَهُمْ تَسْنِيمُهَا، وَهُوَ مَذْهَبُ مَالِكٍ

“In it is that the way of the Prophet is that the grave is not raised above the ground by a great raising, nor humped — rather it is raised about a hand-span and made flat. This is the position of al-Shafi’i and those who agreed with him. And Qadi Iyad related from most of the scholars that in their view the better thing is to hump it, and that is the position of Malik.”

— Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi, al-Minhaj Sharh Sahih Muslim, Volume 7, printed page 36

A hand-span.

The whole dispute, in the hands of the man who wrote the standard commentary on this book, is about whether the earth over a grave should be raised the width of your hand and left flat on top, or heaped up into a hump.

That is the argument.

Inches of soil.

Flat or rounded.

And notice who is on which side.

Al-Shafi’i says flat.

Malik says humped.

And al-Nawawi reports, from Qadi Iyad, that most of the scholars were with Malik.

So the majority position, in the tradition the objection comes from, is the more raised grave.

I want to leave one phrase with you before we move on, and I am not going to do anything with it tonight for another forty minutes.

Look at what he actually wrote.

Just hold that.

We will come back for it.

And there is one more thing on this page, and it is a piece of ordinary care that the objection loses.

That report has two commands welded into one sentence —

— and they get quoted together as though they are one ruling about graves.

Al-Nawawi separates them.

On the first half he says simply:

فِيهِ الْأَمْرُ بِتَغْيِيرِ صُوَرِ ذَوَاتِ الْأَرْوَاحِ

“In it is the command to alter the images of ensouled beings.”

— Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi, al-Minhaj Sharh Sahih Muslim, Volume 7, printed page 36

That is a ruling about making images of living creatures.

It is an entire separate discussion in Islamic law with its own literature.

It has nothing to do with graves at all; it simply happened to be in the same sentence because the Commander of the Faithful was sent to do two jobs on one journey.

Two rulings.

One sentence.

And al-Nawawi keeps them apart, because that is what a careful reader does.

Neither half carries the charge.

And Then Page Thirty-Seven, Where It Turns

The next page carries the report from Jabir — the plastering, the sitting, the building.

The running head reads

And here al-Nawawi gives us the rulings of his school, one by one.

I am going to read them and then I am going to ask you to look at the last one very carefully.

قَالَ أَصْحَابُنَا: تَجْصِيصُ الْقَبْرِ مَكْرُوهٌ، وَالْقُعُودُ عَلَيْهِ حَرَامٌ، وَكَذَا الِاسْتِنَادُ إِلَيْهِ وَالِاتِّكَاءُ عَلَيْهِ. وَأَمَّا الْبِنَاءُ عَلَيْهِ: فَإِنْ كَانَ فِي مِلْكِ الْبَانِي فَمَكْرُوهٌ، وَإِنْ كَانَ فِي مَقْبَرَةٍ مُسَبَّلَةٍ فَحَرَامٌ، نَصَّ عَلَيْهِ الشَّافِعِيُّ وَالْأَصْحَابُ

“Our companions said: plastering the grave is disliked, and sitting upon it is forbidden, and likewise leaning against it or reclining upon it. As for building over it — if it is on land the builder owns, it is disliked; and if it is in an endowed cemetery, it is forbidden. Al-Shafi’i and the companions stated this explicitly.”

— Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi, al-Minhaj Sharh Sahih Muslim, Volume 7, printed page 37

Four rulings.

Let me lay them out.

1. Plastering a grave — disliked.

2. Sitting on a grave — forbidden.

3. Building over a grave, on land you own — disliked.

4. Building over a grave, in an endowed cemetery — forbidden.

Now.

The last one is the strong one.

It is the only forbidden in the list that touches building at all.

It is the one the whole objection needs.

So look at what it is made of.

A maqbara musabbala — an endowed cemetery — is a particular thing in Islamic law.

It is ground that has been given away in endowment — made waqf — for the common burial of the Muslims.

It belongs to everybody and to nobody.

It is set aside so that every person in the town who dies has somewhere to be put.

And you may not take a piece of it for yourself.

That is why building there is forbidden.

Not because of what you might do at the grave.

Not because of what is in your heart when you stand at it.

Because the ground is not yours, and putting a structure on it takes a share of something that was given to all the Muslims and fences it off for one family.

It is a ruling about property.

It is a question of endowment.

Read the whole passage again and look for the word shirk.

Look for idolatry.

Look for worship.

Look for any suggestion — any — that what is at stake here is the oneness of God.

It is not there.

It is not there because that is not the kind of ruling this is, and the man writing it knew exactly what kind of ruling it was.

There is one more line on that page, and honesty requires that I read it to you, because it is the strongest thing in the passage for the other side and I am not going to step over it:

قَالَ الشَّافِعِيُّ فِي الْأُمِّ: وَرَأَيْتُ الْأَئِمَّةَ بِمَكَّةَ يَأْمُرُونَ بِهَدْمِ مَا يُبْنَى

“Al-Shafi’i said in al-Umm: and I saw the authorities at Mecca ordering the demolition of what was built.”

— Yahya ibn Sharaf al-Nawawi, al-Minhaj Sharh Sahih Muslim, Volume 7, printed page 37

There it is.

Structures were pulled down at Mecca, and al-Shafi’i saw it, and al-Nawawi records it approvingly in the middle of this passage.

And it sits exactly where the sentence before it put it: in the endowed cemetery, on ground that was not the builder’s to build on.

That is the honest shape of it, and you now have both edges of the thing in your hands.

Lessons for Our Time

The Charge Was Never About the Oneness of God, and Their Own Books Say So

Here is the first thing to carry out of this room.

You were told that this is a question about tawhid — monotheism.

That when you stand in front of that lattice in Mashhad or in Najaf you are doing something that touches the oneness of God — the one thing in this religion that cannot be touched.

And then we opened the standard commentary on one of the two books that tradition holds soundest, at the two pages where it deals with exactly these reports, and what did we find it arguing about?

How high the earth is heaped over a grave.

Whether the top of it should be flat or rounded.

Who owns the ground it sits in.

That is it.

That is the whole of it, on the page, in the hands of the man the tradition trusts most to tell it what its own hadith mean.

And I want to be careful here, because this is where it would be easy to score a point and I do not want to.

I am not saying al-Nawawi would approve of everything that is done at a shrine.

I have no idea what he would say about the dome at Karbala; he never saw it and he never wrote about it.

That is not the claim.

The claim is narrower and it is stronger for being narrow.

It is this: when the man who wrote the standard commentary on Sahih Muslim sat down with these two reports, he put them in the chapter on funeral law, and he discussed them under the headings of disliked and forbidden, and he reasoned about them using the law of endowments.

He did not put them anywhere near the oneness of God.

So when somebody tells you that this is a tawhid question, you are allowed to know — gently, and without any need to say it loudly — that their own tradition did not treat it as one.

And here is what that actually looks like on a Thursday, because a lesson you cannot use is not a lesson.

You do not say:

That is a name being thrown, and it will be met with another name, and you will both be there an hour later having thrown eleven names at each other.

You say something much smaller.

You say:

And you wait.

Because most people who say this have never been asked that question, and they will discover, in the middle of answering you, that they had assumed it meant a dome, and that nobody ever told them it meant that — they simply filled the gap in.

And if they want to know what the scholars of their own school said it meant, you can tell them: a hand’s width of earth, and an argument about whether the top of it is flat or rounded.

That is it.

That is the whole intervention.

You have not won anything and you have not humiliated anybody.

You have put one honest question into a place where there had only ever been a slogan, and you have left it there to do its work.

A Disagreement Is Not an Accusation

And here is the second thing, and it is the one I would most like you to take home.

Look again at what we read on page 36.

Al-Shafi’i held that the grave should be flat.

Malik held that it should be humped.

And most of the scholars, as Qadi Iyad reports it, were with Malik.

Two Imams of the Sunni tradition.

Founders of schools that hundreds of millions of Muslims follow to this day.

In open disagreement, in writing, about the shape of the earth over a dead man.

And here is what did not happen.

Neither of them called the other an idolater.

Neither of them said the other had left Islam, or was praying to stone, or had made a religion out of masonry.

They disagreed the way scholars disagree — in books, with evidence, for a century, in front of everybody — and then they went on being two Imams of the same religion.

Something happened between then and now.

And I want to be very careful about how I say the next part, because there is an easy version of it that I am not going to give you.

The easy version names somebody.

It picks a movement, or a century, or a country, and it puts the blame there, and everybody in this room feels a little better for ten seconds and a little worse for a week.

We are not doing that.

We have never done that here and we are not starting tonight.

I will say only this, and then I will stop.

Something happened between Malik and now.

And whatever it was, it did not happen in the books.

The books are still there.

You can read them.

The argument in them is about hand-spans and endowed ground, and it is conducted between men who never once suggested that the other one had left the religion.

What we are dealing with today is not in those books.

It came from somewhere else.

And you do not have to know where it came from, or name it, or fight about it, to know that it is not what you were handed by the tradition.

And I want to say one more thing, and it is for the people in this room who have been hurt by this — because some of you have, and not by strangers on the internet.

By family.

By somebody whose opinion mattered to you.

It would be very easy to carry this the wrong way.

To let it settle into a grievance you take out and turn over.

To become somebody who is always half-waiting for the next time it gets said, so you can be ready.

Do not do that.

It will cost you far more than it costs them.

The person who says this to you has almost always been handed it.

They did not sit down with the commentary on Sahih Muslim and reason their way to it over a winter.

Somebody gave it to them in three sentences, the same way somebody might have given it to you, and it felt like defending God, which is not a contemptible thing to want to do.

So when you answer — and you will now be able to answer — answer the way you would want to be answered if you were the one who had been handed the three sentences.

Which, on some other subject, in some other week, you almost certainly have been.

That is enough for one point.

Let us go to the Book.

What the Book Actually Does

Back to the Three Verses

Now we go back to where we started.

Earlier, I read you three verses from the chapter of the Pilgrimage and asked you to notice only the arrangement.

You have been carrying them.

Let me put the third one back in front of you, because now you have the charge in your hands and it will sound different.

ذَٰلِكَ وَمَن يُعَظِّمْ شَعَائِرَ اللَّهِ فَإِنَّهَا مِن تَقْوَى الْقُلُوبِ

“That — and whoever venerates the signs of God, that is from the God-fearing of hearts.”

— Qur’an, Surah al-Hajj (the Chapter of the Pilgrimage) #22, Verse 32

Whoever venerates the signs of God.

Not

Not

Not

It is put to us as something good, in a sentence of praise, and it is not hedged.

So the first question is the obvious one.

What is a sign of God?

What a Sign Is

For this we go to al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an — the commentary of Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, a scholar of the last century whose reading of the Qur’an is the one this tradition has leaned on more than any other., and who we have cited from many times across these sessions.

Here is his definition:

الشَّعَائِرُ جَمْعُ شَعِيرَةٍ وَهِيَ الْعَلَامَةُ، وَشَعَائِرُ اللَّهِ الْأَعْلَامُ الَّتِي نَصَبَهَا اللَّهُ تَعَالَىٰ لِطَاعَتِهِ

“The signs are the plural of a sign, and a sign is a mark. And the signs of God are the markers that God, exalted is He, has set up for His obedience.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Hajj #22, Verse 32

A marker.

A thing set up so that you will know where you are and what you are doing.

And he immediately gives us an example, and he gives it from the Qur’an itself —

I want to be careful here, and I want to be careful in public, because there is a shortcut available at this point and I am not going to take it.

The shortcut is to say: a sign of God is any marker God sets up for His obedience, and therefore the places where His friends are buried are signs of God, and therefore venerating them is commanded by this verse.

I am not saying that, and I want to tell you exactly why, because the reason is better than the shortcut.

Allamah Tabataba’i does not read this verse that way himself.

When he comes to the question of what the signs of God refers to in this particular verse, he holds — on the reading of the Imams, peace and blessings be upon them — that it refers to the sacrificial animals of the pilgrimage.

And he mentions the general reading, the one that says it means every marker set up for obedience, and he sets it aside for this verse.

His words are that the context does not suit it.

So I will not put a reading into his mouth that he specifically declined to make.

What we have from him is a definition, and it is his.

And what we have from the Qur’an is an instance, and it is the Qur’an’s.

And we are going to work from those two, honestly, and see where they take us.

Because they take us somewhere, and we do not need to overstate a thing that is already strong.

Two Hills, and a Woman Looking for Water

So let us go to the instance the Book gives us.

The Safa and the Marwa.

They are two rocky rises at the edge of the sanctuary at Mecca.

Every one of you who has been for Hajj or for Umrah has walked between them, seven times, back and forth.

It is not optional.

It is part of the rite.

Here is Allamah Tabataba’i on that verse:

لَيْسَتِ الشَّعَائِرُ التَّكْوِينِيَّةَ، بَلْ هُمَا شَعِيرَتَانِ بِجَعْلِهِ تَعَالَىٰ إِيَّاهُمَا مَعْبَدَيْنِ يُعْبَدُ فِيهِمَا، فَهُمَا يُذَكِّرَانِ اللَّهَ سُبْحَانَهُ

“They are not signs by their created nature — rather they are two signs by God’s making them two places of worship in which He is worshipped, so that they call God, glory be to Him, to mind.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Baqarah #2, Verse 158

And then the phrase I want you to hold for the rest of the night:

فَلَا يَضُرُّكُمْ أَنْ تَعْبُدُوهُ فِيهِمَا

“So it does no harm to you that you worship Him in them.”

— Allamah Sayyed Muhammad Husayn Tabataba’i, al-Mizan fi Tafsir al-Qur’an, on Surah al-Baqarah #2, Verse 158

Read that again, and look at the small words, because the small words are the whole argument.

Not

There is a pronoun there and it does not point at the hills.

And there is a preposition there and it puts you inside a place rather than in front of an object.

You worship God in the place.

You do not worship the place.

That is the answer to one half of tonight’s charge, and it did not come from us.

It came from a commentary on a verse about two hills in Mecca that has nothing to do with graves at all.

Now — and this is the question I think is the honest one — what made those two hills into signs?

They are rocks.

There is nothing in the geology.

God did not build them differently from the ridge next to them.

What happened there is that a woman was left in a valley with a baby and no water, and she ran.

Seven times, back and forth, up one rise and down and up the other, looking for anything.

She was not performing a rite.

She was a mother in a desert who was about to watch her son die.

And God took that — that particular half hour of one woman’s desperation — and He held it so dear that He wrote it into the pilgrimage, and made every believer who comes to His House walk the path her feet made, for as long as the House stands.

That is what makes a stone a sign.

It is not the stone.

It was never the stone.

It is what was done there, and who did it, and what God thought of them for doing it.

And I have to put the limit next to it, in the same breath, because otherwise I am doing the very thing I have spent an hour objecting to.

A sign is a sign because God appointed it.

He appointed those two hills.

We do not get to appoint anything.

Nobody in this room, and nobody in any room, has the authority to look at a place and decide that it has become a sign of God.

That is not ours.

So I am not going to stand here and tell you that a shrine is one of the signs of God.

I am not going to use that word of it, and you should not either, and if you hear somebody using it you can tell them gently that they have overreached.

What I am telling you is something different and I think it is stronger.

I am telling you that the mechanism is the same.

That when God makes something honoured, the honour never sits in the material.

It sits in the connection.

And that a man who cannot see how veneration works when he is walking between the Safa and the Marwa has not understood his own Hajj.

The Titles We Give Our Own Scholars

And while we are standing on what makes a sign a sign, let me deal with something you have every right to ask about, because it is the same mechanism and it is sitting in plain view.

We call our senior scholars Ayatullah.

We call others Hujjat al-Islam.

And somebody has said to you, or somebody will:

Let me answer that the honest way first.

Nobody did.

No Imam handed anybody those words.

They are not in al-Kafi and they are not in Man La Yahduruh al-Faqih.

They grew up in the seminaries, centuries afterwards.

The first man our histories record being called Ayatullah is Allamah al-Hilli, the jurist of Hilla, who died in the year 726 of the Hijrah — some seven centuries after the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions.

These titles are ours.

We made them. I am not going to stand here and pretend they came down from heaven.

But look at what we made them out of.

اللَّهُمَّ ارْحَمْ خُلَفَائِي — ثَلَاثَ مَرَّاتٍ — قِيلَ لَهُ: وَمَنْ خُلَفَاؤُكَ؟ قَالَ: الَّذِينَ يَأْتُونَ مِنْ بَعْدِي وَيَرْوُونَ أَحَادِيثِي وَسُنَّتِي فَيُعَلِّمُونَهَا النَّاسَ مِنْ بَعْدِي

“O God, have mercy on my successors — three times. It was said to him: and who are your successors? He said: those who come after me, and narrate my hadith and my sunnah, and teach it to the people after me.”

— the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him, his family, and his righteous companions; Shaykh al-Saduq, Uyun Akhbar al-Rida, Volume 2, hadith 94

And when they asked him who those were, he did not say

and he did not say

He said:

Not what they are.

What runs through them.