When Mousa departs, his son Ali will succeed him.

When Mousa departs, his son Ali will succeed him. When Ali departs, his son Muhammad will succeed him. When Muhammad departs, his son al-Hujjah Muhammad al-Mahdi will succeed him.

These are the twelve ones." So that Jew embraced Islam and praised Allah for having guided him.[^3] If we wish to turn the pages of Shi’a books and discern the facts they contain with regard to this subject, we will surely find many times as many ahadith as this one, but this suffices to prove that Sunni scholars do admit that the number of the Imams (as) is twelve, and there are no such Imams besides Ali (as) and his purified offspring.

What strengthens our conviction that the Twelve Imams from (as) were never tutored by any of the Ummah's scholars is the fact that no historian, nor any traditionist, nor any biographer, has ever indicated that one of the Imams from (as) learned what he knew from some sahaba or tabi’een as is the case with all the Ummah's scholars and Imams.

Abu Haneefah, for example, was a student of Imam Ja’far-al-Sadiq (as); Malik was a student of Abu Haneefah; al-Shafi’I learned from Malik and so did Ahmed ibn Hanbal.

As regarding the Imams from (as), their knowledge is gifted by Allah, Glory and Exaltation to Him, and they inherit such knowledge son from father, for they are the ones to whom the Almighty specifically refers when He says, "Then We gave the Book for an inheritance to those whom We chose from among Our servants" (Holy Qur'an, Surah Fatir 35:32). This much ought to convince the discreet reader that the information stated in this section is taken from a very reliable source.

The Basmala Whenever we recite a verse from the Holy Qur'an, we start with the Basmala, that is: Bismillahir-Rahmanir-Rahim , In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the most Merciful. In the Fatiha, the first chapter of the Holy Qur'an, this Basmala is a verse all by itself, whereas in all other chapters, with the exception of Bara'ah or Tawbah where it is not recited, it serves as an introduction to other verses. On pp. 39-40, Vol.

1, of his Tafsir , al-Qummi chronologically arranges the isnad of one particular statement made by Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq (as) and recounts the longest list of narrators we have ever come across.