No sooner were the Imāmiyyah and the extremists considered as integral that the Wahhābīs started calling the Shī‘ahs rāfidī [heretics], whereas this is a general term used in sectarian literature to identify most of the extremist groups whom the Shī‘ah scholars had considered as unbelievers long before the Sunnīs attempted to do so. This is why Anwar Jundī says, “The rāfidīs are neither Sunnīs nor Shī‘ahs.”[1]
There is no need to quote hundreds of other oral or written statements of Sunnī scholars to demonstrate the danger there is in identifying the Shī‘ism with the extremists.
These citations, if made, will add up to many pages. The identification of the Shī‘ism with the Extremism, hard for an analyst to discern at the onset, is thus known to be one of the biggest problems the enemies of Islam have worked out in order to destroy the foundation of the Islamic unity. It is difficult to recognize because the enemies of Islam have deceptively clothed the hidden carcass it contains in seemingly befitting attire and made it into a Muslim institution. Today, there are simple-minded Sunnīs who have been deceived by the Wahhābīs, have not conceived their ominous aims and are caught up in this problem. This situation is, however, being made ineffective within the narrow circle it has made around the Wahhābī faction.
It is good to know that the Wahhābīs do consider the Shī‘ahs as people of extreme thoughts, but cannot realize that in fact the Shī‘ahs are not afflicted with Extremism; it is the Wahhābīs themselves who suffer from the disease of the inability to identify the Shī‘ahs. They try to find out the factors that have contributed to the appearance of the Extremism in the Shī‘ahs, but cannot understand that they should, instead, look for the reasons of “the mingling problem” in themselves.
Having realized that the Wahhābīs are trapped because they had not properly investigated previous Sunnīs’ books, the contemporary Sunnī thinkers began to look for the factors that helped in the emergence of the deviation.
They have now clearly announced that the Shī‘ahs do not suffer from the Extremism; this is an illusion that has the Wahhābīs in its grip, and has come about because they did not distinguish between the Shī‘ism and the Extremism.
I made an extensive study and learned that the methods of study into the Shī‘ism are restricted to the following three:
1) The Wahhābī faction’s method;
2) Past and present Sunnī thinkers’ method;
3) The Shī‘ah scholars’ methods.
I was, at first, firmly devoted to the Wahhābī manner; but some time later, I came to know of the Sunnī method and was, later on, guided to study the Imāmiyyah scholars’ method. There I noticed an undeniable contrast between the Wahhābī and Sunnī approach. If we accept the Wahhābīs’ method in spite of so many differences and variations, then logically speaking, both methods will be invalid; that is, neither the Wahhābī research nor the Sunnī analysis on the Shī‘ism.
In the following parts you will come to believe that the Sunnīs’ interpretation of the Imāmiyyah’s creed presents more facts than the Wahhābī’s comment that bears absolutely no reality and is mere presumption.
When we review the product of the Wahhābīs’ studies, we learn that they are at a complete loss to give a correct interpretation of the Shī‘ah belief system. The crooked image that the Wahhābīs portray of the Shī‘ism is not anywhere close to what the eminent Sunnī and Shī‘ah scholars paint for us.
Being in the grip of a gross deviation and under the influence of the extreme view of identifying the Imāmiyyah with the Extremism when there is no link between the Shī‘ism and Extremism, the Wahhābīs are never able to penetrate the correct meaning of divinity, prophesy and other realities of the Imāmiyyah as the Shī‘ahs understand them. It is evident that such circumstances bring the Wahhābīs nothing but perplexity.
Strange to say, some simple-minded Sunnīs accept the Wahhābīs’ opinion concerning the Shī‘ahs and mock the manner their thinkers had followed. These people are unaware of the harsh conflict going on between the Sunnīs and Wahhābīs; so they are easily deceived. These conflicts stem from the issue of the Shī‘ah identity.
Just as the issue of the Shī‘ah identification launched a struggle within the Sunnīsm when the Wahhābīyyah appeared in the eighteenth century A.D., it has stretched the battlefield out to include the Wahhābīs and Sunnīs in a conflict, the reason for which we will never understand until the problem has been settled. Many of the matters that were simply a differing point between the Shī‘ahs and Wahhābīs have now turned into points of conflict between the Sunnīs and Wahhābīs.
The Sunnīs, fully aware of the radical dissimilarities between the Imāmiyyah and Extremism, have openly said that what the Wahhābīs raise against the Shī‘ahs pertains only to the Extremism of the Ghulāt, not the Shī‘ahs. The Wahhābīs’ viewpoint, though an aid in the intensification of the struggle between the Sunnīs and Shī‘ahs, has developed into a fire that is now burning the Wahhābīs and Sunnīs both. The reason for the oft-repeated warnings of the Shī‘ah and Sunnī thinkers is now made clear. So long as the problem among the three sects is not settled, there will be no hope to reach an understanding and stop the tension.
