Why a Marja'?

Mahdawiyyah, Part 35 · The Architecture of Guidance, Part 19 · The House Beside the Grave, Part 11

Why a Marja'?

Why do I need a middleman between me and my religion — and if the experts can't even agree, why follow any of them? Tonight we take that question at full strength, and answer it.

It begins with a verse about news. Something reached the believers — a matter of safety, or of alarm — and some of them broadcast it at once. The verse does not blame them for hearing it. It blames them for passing it on, instead of taking it to those who could draw out the truth of it. The word is istinbat, from the first clean water that rises from a well. Something reaches every one of us, every day, that sounds like religion: a clip, a forwarded message, a screenshot of a ruling. What do we do with it — and who do we take it to?

The first answer surprises people. Nobody stands between you and God. The marja''s own book of rulings opens by saying that the fundamentals of the faith cannot be taken from anyone on his say-so: whether there is a God, a Prophet, an Imam of our Age — that you come to yourself. What you follow a jurist in is practice: how to pray, never whether there is a God to pray to. And you follow him the way you follow a doctor you have checked — because nobody can be an expert in everything.

So the real question is not why follow anyone. It is what do you check? The tradition gives a measure: learning that other scholars can test, and conduct that you can watch. Ask the neighbours — not the follower count.

The question underneath it

When the word of the Imam of our Age reaches us through other people, whom do we trust to carry it — and how do we know?
And the harder question, which is about us: what does it mean to be employed by him — and what do we owe the one who is sent to us?

What the evening covers

• A man measured by the measure. An afternoon in June 1989, and the man about to be chosen as Leader at the lectern, telling the Assembly that he was not worthy — told whole, with what the room answered.

• "They don't even agree." Three jurists' rulings on sighting the new moon, set side by side — and one question asked three times: what counts as seeing? The book of rulings expects its jurists to differ, and tells you what to do when they do. A difference is not a contradiction.

• A forwarded image is not a fatwa. The book names the four ways a ruling reaches you, forbids anyone who is not a jurist to give one, and tells the person who passed on a false one what he owes.

• Who watches over them. A jurist who had his own well filled in before he would rule on wells — and the line in the letter of the Imam of our Age: they are my proof over you, and I am God's proof over them.

• The one who carries his word. The letter Imam Husayn, peace be upon him, wrote to Kufa when he sent Muslim ibn 'Aqil — my brother, my cousin, the trusted one of my household — and what we owe the one sent to us, in a fatwa rather than an opinion: up the chain, never around the room.

It ends with the scholars who kept the lamp and handed it on. And the maqtal is for Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr — raised in the house of Imam Ali, peace be upon him, and sent to Egypt with his Imam's letter to read aloud to its people.