so that we may oblige people...

so that we may oblige people, Insha-Allah, to follow your knowledge, and we will disseminate your books in all lands and make sure that nobody disagrees with their contents nor judge except according to them," and that they should send their envoys and messengers to him during the pilgrimage.

A clue referring to his methods of intimidating people to follow him is his statement: "The people of Iraq will be made to do it, and we will strike their heads with the sword and split their spines with our whips." This statement indicates the extent of persecution meted to the poor Shi`as then at the hands of oppressive rulers who were persecuting and killing them in order to force them to abandon their allegiance to the Imams from and to follow Malik and his likes.

FOURTH: We notice that Imam Malik and Abu Ja`far al-Mansour were subscribing to the same tenets and biases towards certain sahaba rather than others, and to their allegiance to the caliphs who had taken control of the caliphate by intimidation and persecution.

Malik has said in this regard, "Then he discussed knowledge and jurisprudence with me, and I found him to be the most knowledgeable of all people about what is agreed upon and the most informed of their disagreements, etc." There is no doubt that Abu Ja`far al-Mansour reciprocated the same views held by Malik whom he complimented in a statement he had previously made to him during a meeting between both of them which took place before this one; said he then, "By Allah!

I do not find anyone more knowledgeable than the commander of the faithful or more acquainted with fiqh." By the "commander of the faithful" he meant, of course, himself. From the above text we can understand that Imam Malik was a Nasibi: He never recognized the caliphate of the Commander of the Faithful Ali ibn Abu Talib at all. We have proven from the above that they all objected when Ahmad ibn Hanbal added the name of Ali to the list of the "righteous caliphs," making him the fourth.

It is quite obvious that Malik died many years before the birth of Ahmad ibn Hanbal. Add to the above the fact that Malik relied, while transmitting hadith, on Abdullah ibn Umar, the Nasibi who used to say that they never regarded anyone during the lifetime of the Prophet as being equal to Abu Bakr, then Umar, then, Uthman, and that the sahaba beyond that were all alike! Abdullah ibn Umar ranks as the most prominent among the narrators of hadith whom Malik quotes.