When we say that the Prophet had to “teach” his successor the Divine issues...

When we say that the Prophet had to “teach” his successor the Divine issues, the word “teach” is not a usual word; rather this was the complete capturing of his successor's soul, so that he could learn all that the Prophet was about to teach him. In the end, it should be noted that Muslims, after the expansion and spread of Islam all over of the globe, were faced with unprecedented problems and new issues, which were never brought up at time of the Prophet.

The discovery of solutions to such issues through the Holy Quran or narrations is problematic and disputable. Under such conditions, it is up to a direct recipient of the Divine revelation to interpret the verses of the Holy Quran and the narrations and to issue the proper verdict. One of the problems of the Sunnite community is that they want to interpret all Islamic affairs by the limited number of Quranic verses.

They feel hindered and frustrated in many cases when they are unable to solve problems and they resort to analogy, which everyone knows to be baseless when answering the needs of the Ummah. However, if there was a qualified individual who could get the solutions from the Prophet and could resolve people's problems, he could put an end to such chaos, which exist to this day and would guide people to the right path.

If analogies could be resorted to only under rare occasions, we could say Islam permits us to solve the rare problems via analogies. But, on the other hand, if the very basis of Islam lay on guesses, we would have introduced to the world the legal and moral system of Islam on a baseless foundation. Then how could we expect the people of the world to carry out the Islamic legal and moral system when we doubt the Divine inspiration for such commands?

The Ignorance of the Ummah’s religious leaders There are numerous cases of ignorance by religious leaders in history. Scientific calculations will lead us to the fact that there should be among the Ummah a learned, well informed and knowledgeable Imam who could protect and secure the very treasure of Divine commands and let people know of Divine instructions.

Here are some cases of ignorance on the part of the Caliphs: In the presence of the Prophet's companions Omar ordered a pregnant woman who had committed adultery to be stoned. However, the order was annulled by Imam Ali (as) under the pretext that the woman was guilty but the unborn child was in fact innocent. The Caliph ordered a man who had committed adultery to be stoned.