Collection Of Articles (Refuting Shia) - Enjoy Islam

The Myth of the Shia Mahdi
Page 4 of 5
Activities Of The Representatives
When one reads the classical literature of the Shi‘ah in which the activities of the four
representatives are outlined, one is struck by the constantly recurring theme of money. They are
almost always mentioned in connection with receiving and collecting “the Imam’s money” his loyal
Shi‘i followers. There is a shocking lack of any activities of an academic or spiritual nature. Not a
single one of the four is credited with having compiled any book, despite the fact that they were in
exclusive communion with the last of the Imams, the sole repository of the legacy of Rasulullah
sallallahu ‘alayhi wasallam.
When we look at the major sources upon which the Shi‘i faith is based, we find that most of them
were written after the onset of the Greater Occultation. Those works, like al-Kafi, which was written
during the latter decades of the Lesser Occultation, contain scarcely a reference to any of the four
representatives as narrators from the Hidden Imam. Instead it is filled with thousands of reports
which go back, via other channels, to the fifth and the sixth Imams. That is indeed strange,
considering the fact that a man like Uthman ibn Sa‘id al-‘Amri is claimed to have been closely
associated with the 10th, the 11th as well as the hidden 12th Imam, and also the fact that his son
remained the Shi‘i community’s solitary link to that Imam for half a century. Would it not have been
better and more authoritative for an author like al-Kulayni to report the hadith of his Imams from the
Hidden Imam via his representatives who lived in Baghdad at the same time as he rather than to
trace it all back to the fifth and sixth Imams through a myriad of doubtful channels
But of course, he could not have done that, because the activities of those representatives did not
have as much to do with authentically preserving the legacy of the Ahl al-Bayt as with the collection
of wealth in their names.
In light of the fact that the Shi‘ah explain the necessity of Imamah in terms of the need for an
infallible guide who serves as the repository of the legacy of Ahl al-Bayt, it appears extremely
incongruous that this particular guide has left no sort of legacy of his own whereby the legacy of the
Ahl al-Bayt can be known. Despite the fact that an infallible guide supposedly exists, it is upon
fallible persons such as Muhammad ibn Ya‘qub al-Kulayni that the Shi‘ah must depend for that
legacy.
The only bit of information that has come down to us regarding the Hidden Imam’s authentication of
the hadith legacy of the Shi‘ah is what is recorded by Aqa Muhammad Baqir Khwansari in his book
Rawdat al-Jannat. He writes that al-Kulayni’s book was presented to the Hidden Imam who looked
at it and declared, “Hadha Kaafin li-Shi‘atina” (This is enough for our Shi‘ah). This is incidentally
how the book received its name.
A report such as this creates a huge problem. It appears to be a ratification of the contents of the
book al-Kafi by the infallible Imam. Yet, 9 centuries later the Shi‘i muhaddith, Mulla Muhammad
Baqir Majlisi, would declare in his commentary on al-Kafi, named Mir’at al-‘Uqul, that 9,485 out of
the 16,121 narrations in al-Kafi are unreliable. What did Majlisi know that the infallible Imam was so
unaware of that he would authenticate a book, 60% of whose contents would later be discovered to
be unreliable
Evaluation
The Iraqi Shi‘i scholar, Muhammad Baqir as-Sadr, finds proof for the existence of the Hidden Mahdi
in what he calls “the experience of a community”. The existence of the Hidden Imam, he postulates,
was experienced by the Shi‘i community as a whole in the written communications that the
representatives used supplied them with.
The crux of this argument lies in the fact that an individual experience might be doubted, but never
that of experience of an entire community. However, the glaring flaw in this line of reasoning is that it
very conveniently overlooks the part of the representatives as the individual go-betweens.
http://islamicweb.com/beliefs/cults/shia_mahdi.htm
1/28/2005