On the way...

On the way, the swift-riding courier of the Imam (as) caught up with him and said: “The Imam advises you to feign insanity.” Following this advice, his life was spared; that is, the governor of Kufa who had secretly received a command from the caliph to assassinate him refrained from killing him on the ground of madness.

An intimate companion of Imam al-Baqir (as), Jabir Ju‘fi has said: “Imam al-Baqir (as) has taught me seventy thousand hadith s, which I have not narrated to anyone and will never do. One day he humbly said to the holy Imam (as): “You have told me some secrets, which neither I can endure, nor I have a confidant to entrust them to; and I am about to go insane.” “Go to the desert,” the Imam (as) said to him, “and dig a well, put your head onto it and say in the quiet of the well: “Muhammad b.

‘Ali – i.e., Imam al-Baqir (as) – related such and such to me…” Truly, the Shi‘a s were about to be wiped out, i.e., the genuine Islam was going to take the color of the caliphs and turn into an Umayyad and Abbasid Islam. In such a dire situation, the Holy Imam (as) undertook the revivification and reconstruction of the Islamic knowledge, and set up a great scholarly school whose end-product and output was fourteen thousand expert disciples (such as Hisham, Muhammd b.

Muslim, etc.) in various disciplines, who spread over the extended Islamic lands of the time. Each one of them were, on the one hand, the representative of Imam (as)'s logic which denoted the logic of Islam, the guardian of religious and scientific legacy, as well as the protectors of the true Shi‘ism, and on the other hand, were defenders against infiltration of anti-Islamic and destructive thoughts among the Muslims.

The establishment of such a school of thought and such reconstruction and revival of the Islamic teachings, made Imam Ja‘far al-Sadiq (as) known as the head of Ja‘fari school (i.e., Shi‘ism). Shortly afterwards, however, upon reinforcement of their influence and foundations, the Abbasids assumed the same tyrannical procedure as the Umayyads, and even surpassed them in their atrocities.

Having always been an untiring combatant and a radical revolutionary in the arena of thought and action, Imam al-Sadiq (as) did what Imam al-Husayn (as) had done in his bloody uprising, albeit in the form of teaching and setting up a school of thought, training people, and, putting up an all-out jihad .