It will be noticed that the style of the hadiths varies...

It will be noticed that the style of the hadiths varies little from the Prophet himself to the eighth Imam, the last from whom large numbers of such sayings have been handed down. The most important sources for such hadiths, i.e., the Prophet, the first, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth Imams, are all represented. The basic themes of the selections remain largely constant. The Prophet and the Imams all emphasize God’s transcendence or His “incomparability” (tanzih) with the creatures.

We may speak of God-although only on the authority of His own words, i.e., the Quran-but the expressions we employ are not to be understood as they are when we use the same words to describe the creatures. At the same time, the very fact that words can properly be employed to refer to God shows that in some respect He is indeed “comparable” or “similar” (tasbih) to His creation, if only in the sense that His creation is somehow “similar” to Him because created by Him.

Otherwise, the words employed to speak about Him would all be meaningless, or each one would be equivalent to every other. But, this second dimension of God’s Reality-one more emphasized in Sufism-is relatively ignored in favour of His in comparability. Another theme of the selections is man’s inability to grasp God through such things as the powers of his reason and his senses.

The constant emphasis on this point underlines God’s incomparability and illustrates the particular errors to which the polytheistic and anthropomorphic thinking and imagination of the “Age of Ignorance” (al-jahiliyyah) before Islam was prone. In order to clarify the meaning of the selections, I have tried to supply a sufficient number of annotations. To comment upon the sayings in detail has been the task of much Shia speculation throughout the centuries.

Every word and every sentence has provided numerous scholars with ample opportunity to display their erudition. But for a Western audience, one can only hope to point out the most important references to the Quran and the prophetic hadith literature-references which are largely obvious for the Arabic-speaking Muslim.

Then I have tried to illustrate the manner in which later commentators have elaborated upon the hadiths by quoting a number of explanatory passages, in Part I mostly from Majlisi, the compiler of the Bihar al-Anwar. Some of these commentaries are necessary to understand the bearing of the text, but others may seem to obscure an apparently obvious sentence.