1. Divine authority is beneficial. What God commands is for the good of those commanded. Because of this, practical reason is understood to endorse obedience to the divine commands.
2. Divine authority is always presented in contrast to usurped authority or deceitful authority, which is arbitrary, selfish, and of no real benefit, although appearances to the contrary commonly deceive many.
3. Divine authority is guiding, while de facto authority without divine permission is oppressive and misleading.
4. Authority is backed up by signs, by reason, and by knowledge. It is linked to proof (hujjah) and clear explanation (bayyinah). The recognition of authority is by appeal to individual conscience and reason. No one can be forced to recognize the divine authority given to the prophets.
5. The divine authority given to human beings is limited. For example, one is permitted retribution, but one must not be excessive in this. Divine authority cannot be abused because it is conditioned on proper exercise. As soon as one acts abusively, one forfeits any claim to divine authority. No one can claim divine authority for oppression.
6. The divine authority given to the prophets is not divided. Through them, divine guidance is provided in all areas of life: legal, spiritual, sacramental, teaching, political, etc. For example, rules of good hygiene are woven into the rules of ritual practice; moral teachings are not separated from religious law; and spirituality informs the political decisions of the prophets. On the other hand, authority delegated to others is limited to specific authorizations, e.g., retribution.
7. Authority is authorization. One has authorization for what has a good reason, for what excuses one, for what one has been given explicit divine permission, and for what has been divinely commanded.
Our examination of the above verses suffices to establish that the source of authority in Islam is God. This is not surprising. God's authority, however, is not arbitrary. God does whatever He wishes, but His wishes are not capricious. This point is one on which Shi'ite theology differs with the Ash'arite theology that is common among Sunni Islam.
The above verses also demonstrate a principle by which authority is transmitted: by authorization. God delegates authority to the prophets, peace be with them.
The difference between Shi'ite and Sunni accounts of the succession to the Prophet is often portrayed as a political dispute. This is misleading. There is a dispute about the political leadership of the Muslim community, but this is secondary to a more fundamental disagreement about authorization. According to the Shi'ah, the ultimate basis of authority is not what anyone wants—neither the will of the people, nor anyone else. Even the will of God can only be considered the source of authority because of God's essential justice and mercy. Of course, authority is granted by God's will, but it is not because God wills capriciously for the prophets to have authority that they have it; rather, God wills that the prophets have their authority because of His wisdom and mercy, and the prophets' capacity to provide guidance. He chooses whoever He wills in accordance with His wise and beneficent plan for humanity.
God wills justice, for He is just. Justice means that everything should be in its proper place. Those who require guidance should obey those who can best provide it. Thus, God sends His messengers with authority to provide guidance that will enable those who obey His Messengers to arrange their relations with God and men in the way they can acquire virtue and thereby move toward Him.
Likewise, the succession to the Prophet through the Imams is neither determined by heredity nor by the arbitrary selection of the previous authority, but through divine selection announced through the appointment of each of the Imams by the one who held the authority prior to him.
The Prophet Muhammad was authorized by Allah to bring a law for the people that differed in some respects from what was current among the Christians and Jews of the time, although there were many points in common among them. The successors of the Prophet were not authorized to bring any other law. In this sense there is a difference in the legal authority given to the prophets and to the Imams. Both are given authority in the sense of authorization to guide the people, with a right to obedience from the people, not for their own sakes, but in order to fulfil the divine mandate. However, the law promulgated by the Imams is the law that had been given to Muhammad, and the scripture they taught was the scripture given to Muhammad.
The authority given to both the prophets and Imams to guide the people and which requires obedience is called wilāyah. Wilāyah is a special friendship with God, which is usually translated into English as sainthood, but the waliy in Shi'ism is not understood as the saint in Catholicism. Sometimes wilāyah and walāyah are distinguished, so that the former means the guardianship and right to obedience that characterizes the relation of the mawlā over his followers, while the latter is used to characterize the special friendship and devotion to God of the waliy Allah, as well as the love and devotion of the people toward him. Shaykh Saduq tells us that the most noble servants of Allah are those whose waliy is the waliy Allah and whose enemy is the enemy of Allah.[3] In practice the terms are often confused, and the markings that would distinguish the words wilāyah and walāyah are often omitted in Arabic texts.
Like the Catholic saint, the waliy is a very holy person, one who has an especially intimate relation with God expressed as love and devotion. However, the waliy also takes the utmost care to follow the path prescribed toward God through the guidance given His Prophetص, and because of his success in following the way toward God, he becomes the means through which God guides others to Himself, too, and thus God grants him the right to leadership and to the obedience of the people.
One of the most important narrations on which the authority of Imam 'Ali is based is that of Ghadir, according to which the Prophet appointed 'Ali as his successor after the farewell pilgrimage. It is reported that he brought 'Ali before the people, raised 'Ali's hand in his own and said: “For whomever I am mawlā, this ('Ali) is his waliy. O Allah, befriend those who befriend him and have enmity for those who have enmity toward him.”[4]
An early claim to authority that invokes the concept of wilāyah may be found in a hadith according to which the grandson of the Prophet, Imam Husayn, is reported to have written the following in a letter to the Shi'ah of Basra:
God has chosen Muhammad from among his people, graced him with His prophethood and selected him for His message. After he admonished the people and conveyed His message to them, God took him back unto Himself. We, being his family (ahl), his devotees (awliyā), his trustees, heirs, and legatees, are the most deserving among all the people to take his place.[5]
In this statement it is clear that the sort of authority understood by the Imam to have been given through the appointment of the Prophet includes the authority to command, that is, to provide political leadership to the community, and that this authority is based on spiritual authority through which the Imam guides his followers toward God. Furthermore, the political authority is also rooted in the spiritual authority, for the political direction of the community is not for the sake of merely worldly benefits or by the arbitrary exercise of power, rather, the community is guided politically by the waliy so as to provide an appropriate framework for the spiritual perfection of its members. However, the guidance of the community is not only in order to provide this framework for individual spiritual perfection. The Muslim community or ummah also has a moral and spiritual role to play in the greater community of nations.
The political and spiritual guidance of the community and its members by the Prophet and Imams would not be possible if it were not based on a proper knowledge of the divine Will. Because of the possession of this knowledge, the waliy has teaching authority.
Authority may be further delegated by the Prophet or Imams to others. For example, although the authority to bring a covenant with God in the form of religious law ends with the Prophet Muhammad, the legal authority to issue rulings based on this law and to interpret how the law is to be applied in new circumstances is delegated to those who have gained the appropriate knowledge of the law and are God-fearing. Likewise, teaching authority is further delegated to those who have the appropriate knowledge and are pious, regardless of whether that knowledge is of the law, doctrine, hadiths, the recitation of the Qur'an, its interpretation, etc.
Sacramental authority is a special case that deserves attention given the great differences in this between Catholicism and Islam. There is no priesthood in Islam. There are no sacraments, or special rituals that serve as vehicles for obtaining grace, that require a special person with specific authority to perform them. All of the major sacraments of Islam (if we may be allowed to use the Catholic terminology for them here), that is, bearing witness, prayer, alms, fasting and hajj, can be performed by any Muslim with knowledge of the relevant laws without the presence of the clergy (although leading prayers requires both knowledge of the ritual and justice). There is no power or authority invested in any person by any Muslim religious institution for the performance of any ritual or for the issuing of any decree of Islamic law or for the statement of doctrine.[6]
To find something analogous to the Catholic notion of religious authority in Islam, we would do best to take a glance at the Sufi Orders. According to Sufis, spiritual authority has been passed down through a chain of specific designations, called a silsilah, on the basis of which claims are made to spiritual authority. Among both Sunni and Shi'i Sufis, these chains go back to the Prophet through 'Ali. This not only provides the Sufis with a doctrine of spiritual authority derived by appointment or designation, but it also introduces a sort of sacramental authority that is absent from non-Sufi Islam. The Sufis hold that the pledge between the master and disciple, called bay'ah, is a vehicle of divine grace or barakat, in a manner comparable with Catholic teachings on the sacraments. This initiatory ceremony must be conducted by the Sufi master or someone appointed by him and the initiate. This provides an approximation to the Catholic idea of a sacrament that also can be found in Islam, although it does not correspond to any particular Catholic sacrament. An even closer approximation in Sufism to a specific Catholic sacrament, that of Holy Orders, may be found in the appointment of a shaykh by the Sufi pir, although this is in some ways more like the appointment of a bishop than like the sacrament through which one becomes a Catholic priest. At any rate, even these analogies to Catholic sacraments are only found in Sufi Islam, whether Shi'i or Sunni branches of Sufism. In non-Sufi Shi'i Islam as in non-Sufi Sunni Islam, there is nothing like a sacrament that requires performance by a religious authority.
Sunni and Shi'i theologians differ on the nature of political authority. For the Shi'ah, the wilāyah of 'Ali is comprehensive, in the sense that it includes spiritual, teaching, legal and political authority. For Sunni theologians, the wilāyah of 'Ali is such that he can be recognized as a spiritual authority, (although his spiritual authority is not comparable with that of the Prophet), but this is held to have no political implications. 'Ali's political authority is limited, in Sunni Islam, to the period of his caliphate. He is recognized as a teaching authority, but only to the extent that he had knowledge of the Qur'ān and the teachings of the Prophet. He is accorded legal authority in Sunni Islam because of this same knowledge. The political authority of the caliphs, according to Sunni Islam, is based on the virtues of the caliph and on his acceptance by the Muslim community. The authority of the Imams in Shi'ite Islam, on the other hand, does not require acceptance by the Muslim community. Their authority is appointed whether anyone recognizes it or not. In theory, there is no significant difference in this regard among the various Shi'i sects. Ismaili Shi'a, for example, accept the same basic theory of Imamate as the Twelver Shi'a, but differ as to the identity of some of the Imams.
In traditional Sunni Islam, legal authority is confined to four schools of jurisprudence: Hanbali, Hanafi, Maliki, and Shafi'i. Although there are Sunni Muslims who have called for a re-examination of the formulation of Muslim law in these four schools, the traditional opinion has been that the doors to ijtihad (the independent deriving of the law from its sources) are closed. In Shi'i Islam, on the other hand, the doors to ijtihad have never been closed. For the Shi'ah, legal authority requires not merely a knowledge of the sources, it implicitly also requires the wisdom to derive rulings on specific issues in changing circumstances. Legal authority to derive such rulings is based solely on knowledge and intelligence (as well as piety), however, and does not require any specific sort of permission, according to the dominant view among the Shi'i 'ulama, called usuli. During the Safavid period, there was a debate between usuli and akhbāri schools of Shi'i jurisprudence; and the akhbāris argued that any sort of religious authority, whether legal or merely for the narration of hadiths, required permission from a previous authority. Although many Shi'i religious authorities continue to receive permission from their teachers or from the seminaries for ijtihad, there are notable mujtahids who have practiced ijtihad without obtaining any such permission.
According to Twelver Shi'a, religious authority and wilayah is currently accorded to the Twelfth Imam, who is in a state of ghaybah, or occultation. The period of ghaybah is divided into two: minor and major. During the minor ghaybah, the 12th Imam appointed deputies in order to attend to various affairs of his followers and to provide guidance on some matters. The period after the death of the last deputy, who acted as an intermediary between the people and the Imam, marks the beginning of the major occultation. So, the question arises as to where religious authority is to be found during the major occultation. For this purpose we need to distinguish authority needed for practical affairs and authority pertaining to doctrine. With regard to teaching, the Qur'ān and the hadiths are available to all who have the ability to understand them. Teaching authority is based on knowledge. There is no magisterium to settle doctrinal disputes in Islam. Such disputes can only be settled through strength of argument, reason and knowledge of the relevant sources. It is the duty of each Muslim to ascertain the truth of the fundamental teachings of the religion by his own intellectual efforts, and merely taking the word of an expert is specifically forbidden.
With respect to legal and political matters, however, some criterion for action is a practical necessity. In matters of religious law, each Shi'a must either have competence to derive the law from its sources or follow the rulings of someone who has such competence. Those who are not experts are advised to investigate, by asking who devote their lives to the study of Islamic law; and on the basis of this investigation to follow the pious mujtahid they believe is the most knowledgeable as a source or marji' of imitation (taqlid) in matters of the practical laws of Islam.
According to some hadiths, not only did the Imams refer people to the scholars of Islamic law for legal rulings, but also for arbitration of disputes. This has been taken by many Shi'i scholars to indicate a general delegation of practical authority over disputed issues to the 'ulama. The political form of this idea of delegation is known as the doctrine of wilayah al-faqih, the guardianship of the jurisprudent. Imam Khomeini also argued on rational and practical grounds for the need of religious government. The basic idea is that Islam includes teachings about social, economic and political affairs that can only be put into practice through an Islamic government, a government guided by the teachings and rulings of Islam as understood by those with appropriate expertise in such matters.
There are various interpretations of the doctrine of wilayah al-faqih, which differ on such issues as the qualifications for the position and the scope of its authority; however there is general agreement that the institution is based on exigency and the application of reason to various principles of Islam and governance. It is not a position, like that of the papacy, authorized through something like apostolic succession. One of the most famous statements of the doctrine in recent history is that of Hajj Mulla Ahmad Naraqi (1771-1829):
As for the jurists' duty over people's affairs and over what they have full and all-embracing wilāyah we, by divine grace, say that a just jurist's wilāyah lies in two matters. First, every wilāyah possessed by the Prophet and the Imams (who were the sovereigns and pillars of Islam) is bestowed upon the jurists as well, except what is excluded by juridical proof such as ijmā' (consensus) or nass (established text)…. Secondly, every action concerning the people's faith and worldly affairs is necessary and inescapable according to reason and habit or according to Shar' (law)….
It is obvious and understood by every common or learned man, that when the messenger of God is on a trip, someone behind him is assigned as his substitute, successor, trustee, proof…. This person will accrue all the power that the Prophet enjoyed over his community. There is no doubt that most nusus (texts) concerning the awsiyā (heirs) of the infallible Imam imply the transfer of all power, not merely some of it. This becomes clear especially in connection with the traditions concerning the rank and place of jurists, who are the most excellent men after the Imams….[7]
When we look through the history of Shi'i political thought, we find that from time to time there have been groups of Shi'a who have taken a position diametrically opposed to that expressed above by Naraqi. One of the most extreme of these groups has been the hujjatiyyah, who argue that during the greater occultation of the Twelfth Imam, the Shi'a cannot enforce Islamic law, carry out its punishments, or hold Friday prayers. Others, such as Shahid Mutahhari, argued that during the major occultation, many of the responsibilities of the Imam can be carried out by the office of wilāyah al-faqih, but that some remain as the exclusive authority of the Imam. The dominant view among the Shi'i 'ulama today, however, tends to favor the position that there are no specific areas of authority that are reserved by the Imam and cannot be carried out by the office of wilayah al-faqih.
Despite precedence in Shi'i theological writings, such as the above quote from Mulla Ahmad Naraqi, the doctrine of wilāyah al-faqih was not put into practice in the formation of a government until the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979. Since the Revolution, the office has become recognized in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Clerical authority in Shi'i Islam, however, takes various forms. At the core is the capacity for ijtihad, the ability to derive the rulings of religious law from its sources. The conditions traditionally given for one to have this ability are knowledge and piety. Not all who wear the Shi'i clerical robes and turban have reached the level of ijtihad, however. In an Islamic government, the judges will be appointed by the wali al-faqih. Even in the absence of Islamic government, however, it has been common for Muslim communities to appeal to their local scholars to act as judges in various sorts of disputes. One who has reached the level of ijtihad is able to issue a legal ruling on the basis of the sources of Islamic law, called a fatwa. One who issues such rulings is called a mufti (although this term is not widely used among contemporary Shi'a).
As mentioned above, every Shi'i who is not able to derive religious rulings on the basis of their sources must follow one who has this ability. The mujtahid who is followed is called a marji' taqlid (source of following). Traditionally, the conditions given for being a marji' taqlid were that he should be the most learned of the pious scholars. In order to determine who has such qualifications, one should himself be a scholar or one should consult with those who have sufficient expertise. In recent years, however, it has been suggested that the condition of learning includes deep awareness of contemporary issues and views, as well as social and political problems. In the case of wilāyah al-faqih, the person who is to occupy this position should be a mujtahid, he should be pious and just, he should have administrative talent and courage, and he should have social and political insight.[8]
In addition to ijtihad, maj'iyah, wilayah al-faqih, and judgeship, the Shi'i clergy plays many other roles, such as leading prayers, teaching, leading people in the performance of hajj, giving sermons, doing research on theological issues, etc. Each of these positions has its own specific requirements. In general, however, the appeal to the clergy to perform any such function is based on the requisites of knowledge and piety.
With regard to the recognition of authority, there is no compulsion. Each believer is advised to use his own reason to accept the authority of those best qualified for its exercise. No one can be compelled to accept any particular person as marji'. Even with respect to the office of wilāyah al-faqih, the current Leader himself, Ayatollah Khamenei (may Allah protect him), has ruled that no one can be compelled to accept his authority and if one erroneously rejects this authority on the basis of his own reasoning, he is not to be considered a sinner because of this. However, failure to recognize authority is no excuse for disobedience of the law or criminal activity.
