The Scholar Among the People

Mahdawiyyah, Part 39 · The Architecture of Guidance, Part 23 · Those Who Carry It, Part 4

The Scholar Among the People

Most people will never meet a great jurist. Almost everyone meets the man who marries them, buries their father, and settles the quarrel at the door. What does he owe the people he lives among — and what kind of man do people weep for?

Last week we looked up at the teacher in front of the lesson. Tonight the lesson ends, and he walks out of the door: into the streets, the hospital wards and the villages. It opens with a sentence of Imam Ali, peace be upon him: mix with people in such a way that, if you live, they long for you, and if you die, they weep for you. And it opens with a command God gave His Prophet in Surah al-Kahf: to hold himself patiently with those who call on their Lord morning and evening, and not to let his eyes pass over them.

Then a letter Imam Ali wrote to one of his governors, with the job description in it: sit for the people at both ends of the day, and let there be no doorkeeper between you and them but your own face. The ordinary rights of believers, from Imam al-Sadiq, peace be upon him, read as a scholar's diary for the week: the greeting, the sick, the absent, the wedding, the bier. A great jurist who sent his students home, to teach their own towns; a scholar who carried his own bread and yoghurt so as not to be a burden on them; and a young man who turned down a ready-made seminary, to found one in two rented rooms in a city that had none.

And then what carrying people costs, and how it is done. A scholar found at the bottom of a ditch, digging the foundations of a stranger's house. A lesson that kept falling apart because the people's quarrels came in the middle of it. A house mortgaged, year after year, for the poor. An ice-cream seller corrected without being shamed; an old woman's plate at iftar; a cushion taken away so that a scholar could sit level with the people; an orphan girl given a necklace; and a reply, in a great man's own hand, to a class of schoolgirls: I wish you had advised me.

The question underneath it

If, while the Imam of our Age, may God hasten his return, is hidden, guidance reaches us through the people who carry it — what does the one who carries it owe the people he lives among, and what do they owe him?

What the evening covers

• Where others do not go. The doorkeeper, the one who rarely comes, and why the ordinary rights of believers are not the lesser work of a lesser scholar.

• Here I am. The work no one photographs, standing spent on people, and what carrying them really costs, told plainly.

• Never make them feel small. Correcting without shaming, the truth told gently, and scholars who learn from the people they serve.

• Lessons for our time. Six of them, for the one people come to and for the people who come to him: from the hospital bedside to the group chat.

• One day. A scholar's last day, spent among the poor households, as was his custom, and the question he asked a young man that no one who was there forgot.

It ends with a scholar who once walked through his own door and stood in prayer behind his student, and who, from a hospital bed a few metres from his mosque, sent his visitors away to the Friday prayer. And the maqtal is for Imam al-Rida, peace be upon him: a table with no head on the road to Khurasan, and a morning when he asked for his shoes, knowing where they would take him.