Javânmard et les roses de Nâ-Kojâ-Âbâd  

Bismillahi Rahmani Rahim

Ya 'Ali Haqq! Ya 'Ali Hu!


A spiritual tradition is a like a human being endowed with a body, a soul and a spirit. To reduce a living entity to its sole bodily manifestation is not only to reduce it to  an inert corpse, it is truly to deny the essence of its being and its life. Equally, to reduce a religious tradition to its historical and social manifestation is to reduce it to an shell, lifeless  and devoid of its very heart. In fact it becomes the Gott is tot (God is dead) of Nietzsche. The Christian Jesus being God incarnate gets slaughtered by humanity because he has reduced himself to humanity. It is a two way slaughter. On the one hand the Jews who deny any divinity to Jesus and on the other the Gospels that make Jesus into God incarnate, true man, true God. As Henry Corbin brilliantly shows, the death of the sacred in Western culture was programed in the Gospels because of the confusion between Christ's divinity and humanity. By his divinity being confused or rather consubstantiated with his humanity, this very divinity has made itself vulnerable to death. The secularisation of the West is thus a logical conclusion of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. and manifestation of the principle of tashbih (assimilation).
Shi'ism has been spared such a terrible fate because of its rejection of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation due to its insistence on the doctrine of theophany (divine manifestation). In one of his famous works on Iranian Islamic philosophy, Henry Corbin presents and discusses the thought of the 18^th Iranian philosopher Molla ‘Abdorrahim Damavandi (Corbin 1981:358-64). He highlights an important theme in Damavandi’s thought: the idea of theophany and the concept of idol and icon. Prophets and Imams as well as the universe are in varying degrees manifestations of the Face of God as affirmed in the Qur’an (II:115): Theophany serves a purpose as an icon, an image that serves as a window to access the Divine, and a channel though which divine light is transmitted. The distinction between the two dimensional icon and the three dimensional idol is here fundamental. The icon as a window lets divine light flow whilst the idol traps that same light in its confines.The Christian concept of the Incarnation is as such idolatry because its tashbih traps divinity within the confines of body, history and society.

The reason why I have introduced this article with this short introduction about Incarnation and tashbih is because I wish to address the way Shi'ism has been approached. The 20th century has known two groups of people who have attempted to limit Shi'ism to a historical and social movement and thus attempted to deprive this living tradition of its soul and spirit. This reductionism  transforms Shi'ism into an empty shell in the museum of history, to be analyzed and dissected. Shi'ism becomes like the Christ of the Gospels the victim of his enemies' disbelief in his divinity as well of his own consubstantitive confusion with his humanity.
The first group of people is constituted by Western secularist academics who most often Shi'ism as a solely political movement. According to their vision of things Shi'ism is nothing more than a political movement born out of the partisans (shi'a) of Imam 'Ali (as) who protested against the usurpation of the caliphate by Abu Bakr, Omar and Uthman. For them the essence of Shi'ism is political and Shi'ite theology and spirituality comes as a compensation for not being able to have political power. The position of the Imams (as) as theophanic manifestations is seen as an attempt to justify power theologically. In many ways this perspective is an existentialist one placing the historical and social as the first reality of which the theological and spiritual are just secondary justifications.  In clear this means that the lofty spiritual tradition of Shi'ism based on the lives, writings and teachings of the Imams is nothing more than a "beautiful lie" used to keep the political movement alive.
The second group is made by people who call themselves Shi'a but who have reduced Shi'ism to either a purely exoteric tradition or to a marxist like political movement.
The former would be those among the foqaha who refuse to acknowledge the spiritual dimension of Shi'ism and reduce the whole tradition to a set of rituals and rules. These have always existed in the Shi'a world and have caused Shi'ism a great deakl of damage by persecuting mystics. In the 20th century we have two famous examples of victims of their blind hatred: Allamah Tabatabai (ra) and Ayatollah Khomeini (ra). Allamah Tabatabai (ra) used to be so persecuted by ignorant foqaha that Ayatollah Borujerdi (ra) had to issue an order asking people "to stop throwing stones at Allamah Tabatabai (as)". In the case of Ayatollah Khomeini (ra) it is known that many foqaha considered him and his family to be so impure that they would wash any object touched by him or his family. In his spiritual writings Ayatollah Khomeini (ra) complains about the fanaticism and ignorance of thse foqaha who hate 'irfan (mysticism) and who have reduced Shi'ism to a set of exoteric rules and rituals.
The latter would be constituted by those who propound a solely political view of Shi'ism. There are for example the marxist Alevis who view the Ahl ul Bayt (as) as revolutionaries who fought for a marxist like society. Similar ideas are propounded by Ali Shariati. His famous essay Red Shi'ism vs Black Shi'ism is a marxist interpretation of Shi'a history. It uses marxist premises to structure Shi'a history. There is no doubt about he good intentions and the sincerity of the author but the underlying danger behind this view of Shi'ism is the over-politicisation of Shi'ism. It also lacks the ability to view things in a more complex way. This binary view of Shi'ism suits ideologist, who are certainly the greatest intellectual idolaters of the 20th century.Other forms of political Shi'ism have preserved the spiritual aspect of Shi'ism but their modern use of traditional terms bring the danger to reinterpret Shi'ism retroactively as do Latin American theology of liberation. The danger is not the existence of a balanced political Shi'ism but its ideologisation. Some have gone to the extent of demonizing fellow Shi'a who don't agree with  their monodimensional  political interpretation of Shi'ism. To view Shi'ism  as only a political ideology is to transform it into an empty shell, it is to let the dogs of secularisation lose to drag it into the mud of the turmoils of history.
There is no doubt that Shi'ism has a political aspect. The Prophet (pbuh) and Imam 'Ali (as) but that political aspect is one of the expressions of the very heart of Shi'ism: walaya.

Walaya is the very heart of Shi'ism to the extent, as Amir-Moezzi points out, that Shi'as designate themselves as the ahl al walaya (people of the walaya). It's importance is outlined in many hadith such as:

"Islam is based on a tripod (athafi): prayer, alms and walaya. None of these three can exist without the other."
"God has established 'Ali as a sign ('alam) between Him and His creation and there is none other. The one who follows 'Ali is a believer, the one who rejects him is a disbeliever and the one who doubts him is a mushrik (associanist)"
"(God said to the Prophet) I have created the seven heavens and all that they contain. I have created the seven earths and all that they contain. If oneofy my servants has invoked Me since the beginning of creation and he comes to meet me rejecting the walaya of 'Ali I will throw him in hell!"
"If a servant worships God for a hundred year between al-Rukn and al-Maqam in Mekkah, if he dedicates his days to fasting and his nights to prayer but remains ignorant of the right (haqq i.e. walaya) he will not be rewarded by God."
"The one who dies without knowing his Imam dies the death of a pagan of the time of jahiliyya."

Such is the importance of walaya. But what exactly is walaya?
The word walaya is polysemic and refers to different religious realities that are complementary and simultaneously true and valid.  The meanings change depending on the perspective and context.
From the perspective of the relationship between the Prophet (pbuh) and Imam 'Ali (as) walaya expresses the idea friend and lieutenant. He is the inheritor of the spiritual and political caliphate as well as the master (mawla) of the believers.
From the perspective of the relationship between 'Ali (as) and Allah (swt) walaya refers to the Imam as being the revealed aspect of Divinity, the Deus Revelatus (as a theophany of course never as an incarnation). We will address this aspect of the walaya in another article.
From the perspective of the relation between the Imam and his Shi'a walaya means love. This love, this all consuming devotion is only possible when one understands the implications of the term walaya. Without the guidance and lordship of the Imam, without the conscience that the Imam is the Deus Revelatus, that love is nothing but fickle emotion for a tribal hero, the celebration of a communitarian super-ego.
But when that walaya or dosti (in Farsi) is in tune with the other aspects of the walaya one understands that this love is not only the heart of Shi'ism, it is the reason of this very universe. As the hadith qudsi says:

I was a Hidden Treasure. I wished to be made known, and thus I called creation into being in order that I might be known.

The Revealed Treasure is 'Ali and the walaya that binds us to him is also the knowledge of Allah (swt). This walaya existed before creation when Allah (swt) asked to the assembled souls: Am I not your Lord? (7:172)

This is confirmed by the hadith from al Kafi:

Prophet Mohammad (sawas) said: Oh Ali! You are the one through whom Allah has established his proof over all creation when they were risen in their beginning and unto them you proclaimed "Am I not your sustainer?" and they said "Yes, indeed!" and you said "Is Mohammad not your prophet?" and they said "Yes, indeed!" but when you asked "Is Ali not your Imam?" none of them accepted your walayat, your greatness and your glory save a few among them and those were fewest of the few and only those are the people of the right.

The Shi'a of 'Ali are those souls that have remained loyal to the Imam even before creation through the dosti, the walaya they have for 'Ali, the eternal Imam of whom Imam 'Ali ibn Abi Talib (as) is an historical manifestation. This walaya as we have seen has pre-cosmic and cosmic proportions as it is the underlying pulse of the universe. Shi'ism didn't start 1400 years ago. It existed when the universe was about to be manifested, it existed in its beginning already, it exists now and it shall exist for ever for everything may perish except the Face of God as the Quran says, and that Face is 'Ali. Each wave of the sea sings Ya Ali , every leaf of every tree sings Ya Ali , there is not one atom in the creation that doesn't vibrate through the walaya of 'Ali. This is why the Ka'ba opened its wall for Imam 'Ali's birth, this is why the earth turned red in Kerbala. The struggle between the shi'a of the Imam and his enemies has  existed long before Adam (as).This walaya is the heart of Shi'ism, a religion of pure love of which the fundamental ethos is futuwwah-javanmardi (spiritual chivalry).

It is this walaya that will always keep real Shi'ism alive and defeat those who wish to confine it to history and thus kill it through the intellectual sin of tashbih. Walaya is the eternal victory over all these reductionist attempts coming from close minded foqaha, Orientalist scholars and political ideologues. Whatever they are able reduce and thus kill through secularisation is not Shi'ism but an empty shell,a corpse without a heart, for Shi'ism without walaya is not Shi'ism at all.

kind regards


Bahadur 'Ali Shah