Muhammad relates the fantastic story about those countries...

Muhammad relates the fantastic story about those countries from this unknown narrator in great detail, and at the end of the story he appends the following: After hearing the story the vizier entered his special chamber and asked all of us to come in. He then said: "No one has the right to transmit the story for anyone, as long as I am alive." We too, as long as the vizier was alive, never related the event for anyone[^3].

We have taken care to mention the source of the story so that the readers should realize the weakness of the transmission and its unreliability. For the detail of the story you may refer to the book itself. It is obvious for the scholars that the existence of such countries cannot be proven on the basis of this narrative. First, the reporter of the important story is an unknown person whose identity is unclear. Hence, his report has no credibility.

Second, it is not possible that such places exist when no one has any information about it. This is particularly so in this age when all corners of the world have been mapped out and studied by the scholars. However, some people have defended the existence of these places as vehemently as if they were defending some fundamental Islamic principle. These people say that perhaps such places are present even now, but God has concealed them from strangers and non-believers!

I do not believe that such opinions require any response. Actually, I do not understand what has prompted these people to offer such a whimsical and conjectural explanation of a story whose reliability and credibility is itself questionable! It has been asserted that even if it is assumed hypothetically that such countries are non-existent now, one can still maintain that they did exist in the past and are now in ruins and their inhabitants extinct.

Such an assertion is also baseless, because if such prosperous and large countries with Shi'i population had existed, there would have been many who would have known about them and would have related, however speculatively, the amazing things about them in history books. Ordinarily, it is improbable that such major countries could have existed and no one ever recorded anything about them.

It is equally implausible that such a thing would have been known to only one unidentified person whose report about these places forms the basis of this fantastic narrative.