3) The identity of the Imāmiyyah school of thought
It is impossible to know the intellectual identity of a school of thought before a deep and analytic examination is made of its ideological contents. Yet the Wahhābīs have reversed the procedure. Without having made an analytical study, they have pronounced that the Shī‘ah intellectual identity is Zoroastrian.
Because there was a need for the discussion to proceed logically, the chapter on “the identity of Shī‘ism” came after “the realities of the Imāmiyyah” presented in previous chapters.
Curiously some have claimed that the Shī‘ism is ethnically pure Persian although it carries the Islamic-Arabic identity, but we will, in future discussions, present authentic documents and prove that the Shī‘ahs were all Arabs when Islam first appeared, and most Iranians of the time were Sunnīs. Ibn Khaldūn has, on same grounds, praised them in his Muqaddamah. For certain reasons, however, Iranians abandoned the Sunnīsm and turned to the Shī‘ism.
After it is proved to us that the realities of divinity and Prophecy as the Shī‘ahs understand them are derived from the Qur’an and the Prophet’s (s) Sunnah, as are the Imāmiyyah’s juridical precepts; and, after it is made clear that the religious ends portrayed in the Qur’an, in the Prophet’s (s) Sunnah and the Imāmiyyah school of thought are identical; and, after we have learned that the Qur’an and the Prophet’s (s) Sunnah are the sources where the Shī‘ah knowledge and practical injunctions come from; and, when we know the reality of the Qur’anic issue of the Imamate is exactly as the Imāmiyyah bring it up, we will inevitably conclude that it is impossible to separate Islam’s intellectual trend from the Shī‘ah intellectual identity, provided, of course, that we have followed the previous discussions sequenced; otherwise, we will end up in the vortex of taking the Shī‘ism from the Extremism.
