ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Islam In The Bible Divine Guidance The Islamic principle of divine guidance appears in detail in Tabataba'i 123ff. Ali (1988:84a) defines it briefly.

"The khilafat-e-Ilahia was the apostleship and after the conclusion of the apostleship with the Holy , it was conveyed to Imamate, the divinely inspired heavenly guidance through the godly ones purified by God Himself, who were born pure, who lived pure and who surrendered them­selves in the way of the Lord in all purity, which historic fact is unanimously acknowledged by the Muslim world as a whole.

Islam demands faith in these Holy Imams as in the apostleship of God, as the all-Truthful, holy and infallible guides divinely commissioned for the preservation of verbal form and the true meanings, both external and internal, of the Holy Qur'an, the final Word of God, as its authentic custodians and the divinely inspired inter­preters and the correct models of godly life on earth to be copied by their devotees.

The series of Imamate starts with All ibne Abi Taleb and ends with Mu­hammad ibnul Hasan Al-Mahdi, the last and living Imam of the Age." The salient features of the Imamate as conceived in Islam are therefore that it is a necessary continuation of revelation implied in the institution of prophets. Its representatives are divinely appointed through revelation to their successors. The Imams are pure and infallible. They are custodians and interpreters of the prophetic revelation.

They are models of godly life to be copied. They appear in a series of twelve, and there is always a living one, even if he is in a state of occultation. Prophets can tell us what to do, but may not be able to make us understand in practice how to do it. They can call us away from sin and rebellion against God, but they cannot keep us from falling into formalism and hypocrisy.

Humanity needs something more than the revelation brought to the prophets at the hand of angels and inscribed in holy books. We need implementation. In order to do something properly, you need first verbal instructions (the prophets) and then a live demonstration (divine guidance). What God reveals in words by the prophets He reveals in action, in flesh and blood, by the divine guides. Without divine guidance we cannot apply the true im­port of the prophetic revelation.

`Philip ran thither to him, and heard him read the prophet Elias, and said, Under­standest thou what thou readest?