The Architecture of Guidance - Part 9 - The House Beside the Grave - Part 1 - Shaykh al-Ta'ifa

You have been quoting him your whole life without knowing his name. Almost every narration you have heard about the merit of a prayer, the etiquette of visiting a shrine, or the signs of a believer reaches you through one man: Abu Ja'far Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Tusi. He is why we have what we have. And most people who quote him weekly have never once said his name. He was a boy from Tus, in Khurasan, who at twenty-three walked to Baghdad with a teacher's name and the price of the journey. He arrived at one of the great centres of learning in the Muslim world and sat at the back of the room, carrying other men's books. He got five years with his first teacher, and twenty-three with the next — twenty-eight years a student before he was anything else. What he did afterwards is difficult to overstate. He wrote two of the four books on which this entire tradition's law is built. He wrote the first complete commentary on the Qur'an in our tradition — and quoted the scholars who disagreed with him, by name, fairly, in his own book. He catalogued the scholars who came before him so that later generations could weigh what they had said. And when he was attacked, he did not write a rebuttal. He wrote the library. The question underneath it This session opens a run of nine — The House Beside the Grave — and they all sit on one plain question: When the Imam is absent, how does guidance actually reach anybody? The answer this tradition gives is not a system, and it is not a state. It is people, keeping things, by hand, for a thousand years. What the evening covers * The name. What ta'ifa actually means, why it shares a root with tawaf, and how a word from a single verse of the Qur'an became one man's title. * Twelve dinars a month. What a student lived on, where that money came from — and why the seminary has never taken a penny from a government. This turns into a hard, practical question about the money in your own pocket, and about what it means to give in a way that keeps a scholar free rather than bought. * A door that has to be shut. There is a misreading of Qur'an 9:122 that has done real damage — the idea that religious scholars are a class apart, exempt from what is asked of everyone else. They are not. This session says so plainly, in the words of the scholars themselves. * Two letters with no chain. Two documents arrived at a house in Baghdad addressed to al-Tusi's own teacher. Neither carries any chain of transmission at all. We look at exactly what they say, exactly what can and cannot be established about them, and what an honest scholar does with a document he cannot verify. * The book about waiting, written while the city fell. In the year 447, with Baghdad coming apart around him, someone asked him to write about the absence of the Imam. He did. We have his own account, in the first person, of the state he was in when he wrote it. Why this date This session falls on the twenty-eighth of Safar — the day the Messenger of God, peace and blessings be upon him and his family, passed away in Madinah, and the day his grandson Imam Hasan al-Mujtaba, peace be upon him, was killed by poison and then refused a grave beside him. So the evening ends where it has to. Four days before the end, the Prophet asked for something to write on, and for a writing that would keep his community from going astray. There was an argument in the room. Nothing was written. Everything this session is about is what happened next.

In this session

Sermon: The House Beside the Grave, Part 1 of 9 - Shaykh al-Ta'ifa

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Nohe: Hossein Taheri | Hassan Mola | Martyrdom of Imam Hassan

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Ziyarah: Ziyārat Āl-e Yāsīn (The Visitation/Salutation of the Family of Yāsīn)

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