Who Else Asked This?

Mahdawiyyah, Part 31 · The Architecture of Guidance, Part 15 · The House Beside the Grave, Part 7

Who Else Asked This?

Last week we answered the charge. This week you find out how old it is.

Somebody asks you why you go to a shrine. Four words — why do you do that — and underneath them a suspicion that the line between honouring and worshipping has gone soft, and that you have not noticed because you grew up inside it.

You are not the first person to be asked. Not by centuries.

Long before there was an Islam to ask it in, men in another house sat down with this exact question. And what they did with it is the reason this session exists.

They did not soften it. They wrote it out at full strength. They set down two competing answers, kept the name of the man whose answer they did not take, and then tested both against a real case — asking not which one felt more pious, but which one would actually change what you did on a given morning.

That is not a slogan. That is a method. And it is the same method a Shafi'i scholar of Damascus used, independently, centuries later, which we read together last week.

Why we are opening somebody else's books

Because our own books tell us to.

There is a verse that says God ordained one religion and enjoined it on Noah, and Abraham, and Moses, and Jesus — and on us. There is a narration that says the disposition every human being is made upon is submission, and that in it is the believer and the disbeliever. And there is a verse that tells us how to disagree with the People of the Book, and a commentary on it by Allamah Tabataba'i that describes the two sides drawing near to one another until they support one another in bringing out the truth.

This is not a session about comparative religion, and it is not a session that says all paths are the same. We differ, on things that matter more than this, and the session says so out loud and refuses to pretend otherwise.

What it says is that the differing is supposed to be honourable — and that is not an opinion, it is a command with a verse behind it.

And then it turns

The last third of the evening is not comfortable, and it is not aimed at anybody else.

There is a warning in the Gospel about people who build beautiful tombs for murdered prophets and then say if we had been there, we would never have done what our fathers did. It does not rebuke the building. It rebukes the sentence said while building.

And the first man to turn that warning on the scholars of his own community was Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him — at Mina, before Karbala, using a verse God had revealed about the religious authorities of an earlier people.

He did not think it was about somebody else.

What the evening covers

• Why a Shia majlis opens the books of other houses at all. Three verses and a narration, none of them obscure, and a line stated plainly so nobody leaves with the wrong thing in their pocket.
• What the Talmud actually is — and most of us have never been told. Not a creed. A written record of centuries of argument, which preserves the answers it rejected, by name. You cannot hold it up and say this is what they believe, because on the next line it says the opposite. And we own, out loud, what was said about that literature from this pulpit on the tenth night of Muharram, without taking a word of it back.
• A man who left the group. Twelve scouts go into a land. One of them peels away and goes to the graves of the fathers, and says seek mercy for me. And the whole report hangs on a verb that changes from plural to singular in the middle of a sentence — the same close reading we did last week on a single preposition.
• The question asked out loud, and then tested. Why do they go to the cemetery? Two answers, and then: what practical difference is there? — and the difference, when they find it, is a real case on a real morning.
• What God told a prophet to do at a grave. Stand there. Call to them. With a raised voice. And say — I am joining you. Grouped, in God's own ordering, with tears and with humility of the heart.
• The verse that gets quoted at you, read in full. Four pairs in a single breath — the blind and the seeing, darkness and light, shade and burning heat, the living and the dead. Nobody has ever read the first three literally. Allamah Tabataba'i does not read the fourth literally either, and he says who those in the graves actually are.