ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Al-'imam Al-rida [a] and the Heir Apparency Goals and Methods ==================== After the martyrdom of al-'Imam al-Husayn (A) the objective of the (A), as we see it, was two-fold. Firstly, their goal was to protect Islam against corruption, forgery and mis-interpretation. This was done in several ways.

The foremost of them was to establish the authentic Sunnah in the face of other claims which were influenced, to a lesser or greater degree, by the inclinations of existing regimes and the heresies (ahwa') of those in control of them during the Umayyad and the 'Abbasid eras. Since the corruption (tahrif) on the Qur'anic text was out of question, the most dangerous phenomenon that confronted Islam from within was the narration of forged and corrupted traditions ascribed to the Prophet (S).

The meanings of certain Qur'anic verses were distorted - particularly those concerning the most important political and social concepts - by the means of fabricated and corrupted hadith. Therefore, the Imams (A) did their best to spread the hadith among the people and employed all the means to extend the range of its circulation throughout the various regions.

Secondly, their objective was to protect the followers of the authentic Islamic path, and those who were close to it in various degrees, from ignorance, deviation and the danger of physical liquidation.

Their protection from ignorance was secured by strong emphasis on the diffusion of Islamic teachings among them, through dispatching missionaries to them, founding centres of religious instruction in various regions, and establishing a rightly-guided authority for them, and these affiliated them to the path of the (A).

This affiliation was a conscious one, based on knowledge (ma'rifah) and conviction, which guaranteed continuity and resistance in the face of trials and difficulties, not one based only on emotional attachment or merely on taqlid, for that could not ensure the perpetuity and invincibility of a revolutionary political and ideological movement as sought by the (A).

They were protected from deviation (fitnah) by being persistently and repeatedly prohibited from being assimilated into the infrastructive of an oppressive and irreligious political authority, and by being enjoined to keep aloof from it without dissociating themselves from the rest of the Islamic community.