ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books An Introduction to the Emendation of A Shi‘ite Creed The beliefs of the Imamiyyah To begin with, the lmamiyyah distinguish themselves from other Muslim groups by their doctrine of the divine Imamate, from which they take their name. Thus Muslims are split into two sects on the basis of their different positions on the question of who should succeed the Prophet, may Allah bless him and his family and grant them salvation.

(The history of this division, when and why the schism occurred, is not our concern at this point.) First there are those who maintain that the Prophet of Allah designated an imam after him in a way which was unequivocal and did not require interpretation, that this was done through a revelation from Allah and was not a result of his personal desire for which there was absolutely no divine command, and that he named them individually and said how many there would be, especially the first of them, he being ‘Ali, the Commander of the Faithful, peace be upon him; that the Imams possess knowledge of the shari‘ah, infallibility, perfection, and the power to work miracles such as the Prophet possessed, and that they must be obeyed and revered as he must be; the only difference lies in Prophethood and the revelation of the Divine Law, which are peculiar to him there is no prophet after him.

Secondly, there are those who do not believe in the Imamate in this sense, and who maintain instead that the matter of succession was either neglected, as the Prophet did not say anything definite about it, or that it was left to the Muslims themselves to choose whom they wished to rule over them, although they differed about how they should choose him, what his qualities should be, and the characteristics of the electors.

However, the differences between the Imamiyyah and other Muslim sects concerning the Imamate carries over to disagreements in many other matters, some of which pertain to basic dogma, and some to law and jurisprudence.

The most important points of dogma in which the Imamiyyah differed from other Muslim sects are as follows: a) Regarding Unicity, they believe in the complete and total rejection of any belief in the corporeality of Allah or in anthropo- morphism, either in a literal or an interpreted sense. On this basis, they catagorically deny that Allah is visible, either in this world or in the Hereafter, in wakefulness or in dreams.