# Sunnis vs. Shias | Deep Dive: Iran Ep. 1 | Focal Point with Imam Tom Facchine

**Author:** Tom Facchine
**Series:** Imam Tom Live
**Published:** 2026-04-01
**YouTube:** https://youtu.be/dpCyqcGegH0
**URL:** https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/sunnis-vs-shias-focal-point-with-imam-tom-facchine
**Topics:** History, Politics & Practical Theology

## Summary
This video by Imam Tom Facchine addresses the widespread Islamophobic claim that Muslims are religiously permitted — even encouraged — to lie to non-Muslims through a concept called 'taqiyya.' Imam Facchine explains that this distorted version of taqiyya was not derived from Islamic scholarship but was invented and spread by Orientalist writers, Islamophobic propagandists, and political actors seeking to portray Muslims as inherently untrustworthy. He identifies three key motivations behind spreading this lie: undermining Muslim credibility in public discourse, justifying surveillance and suspicion of Muslim communities, and supporting a political narrative of Muslims as a dangerous 'fifth column' — a recycled trope previously used against Jews, Catholics, and Japanese Americans. In contrast, Imam Facchine clarifies what taqiyya actually means in the Sunni tradition: it is a narrow, emergency allowance for a Muslim who faces death to conceal their faith in order to preserve their life. This concept is rooted in a Quranic verse [An-Nahl 16:106], revealed in the context of early Muslims in Mecca being tortured, specifically referencing the companion Ammar ibn Yasir (رضي الله عنه) who was forced under torture to renounce Islam. The verse clarifies that forced verbal denial of faith does not constitute true disbelief if the heart remains firm. Imam Facchine emphasizes that taqiyya is not discussed in mainstream Sunni fiqh or aqeedah manuals, was never encountered during his five years of Sharia studies in Saudi Arabia, and has nothing to do with deceiving non-Muslims or spreading Islam. The Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) strongly condemned lying and praised truthfulness as a path to paradise. The Islamophobic framing inverts Islamic teaching entirely — treating deception as the norm and honesty as the exception — and functions as an unfalsifiable, self-reinforcing accusation designed to silence Muslim voices.

## Key Points
- The Islamophobic claim that Muslims are religiously obligated to lie to non-Muslims is false and not rooted in Islamic theology.
- The distorted version of taqiyya was invented by Orientalist writers and Islamophobic propagandists, not derived from Islamic sources.
- The taqiyya accusation is unfalsifiable by design — both a Muslim's truthful statements and their denials of the lie can be dismissed as 'taqiyya.'
- Spreading the taqiyya myth serves three purposes: undermining Muslim credibility, justifying surveillance and suspicion, and supporting a political narrative of Muslims as a dangerous internal threat.
- In Sunni Islam, taqiyya refers only to one narrow scenario: a Muslim under threat of death may conceal their faith to preserve their life.
- The Quranic basis for taqiyya is found in [An-Nahl 16:106], revealed in the context of early Muslims being tortured in Mecca, including the companion Ammar ibn Yasir (رضي الله عنه).
- Taqiyya is not a general license to lie, not a strategy for spreading Islam, and is rarely if ever discussed in classical Sunni fiqh or aqeedah manuals.
- The Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ) strongly praised truthfulness and condemned lying, making honesty the foundational rule in Islam.
- The taqiyya trope is part of a broader pattern of recycled conspiracy theories used historically against minority groups such as Jews, Catholics, and Japanese Americans.

## Chapters
- 0:00 Is Iran a Hero or a Sectarian Monster?
- 0:44 Two Extremes: Polemic vs. Erasure
- 4:16 Finding the Middle Ground on Sectarianism
- 5:14 Shi'ism: A Whisper That Grew Into a Shout
- 7:09 Fatima (RA)'s Inheritance and the First Fracture
- 9:08 Why Did Ali (RA) Delay His Oath of Allegiance?
- 18:21 The Council, Abdurrahman (RA), and Uthman (RA)'s Election
- 21:37 Was Uthman (RA) a Puppet? Debunking the Conspiracy
- 32:20 The Cult of Personality Around Ali (RA)
- 34:31 Three Traumas That Changed Everything
- 35:04 The Assassination of Uthman (RA) and Civil War
- 36:00 Hasan (RA)'s Conditional Abdication to Muawiyah (RA)
- 37:12 Karbala: The Wound That Never Healed
- 41:28 The Kaysanites: The First Identifiable Shia Sect
- 42:51 Ghadir Khumm and the Revisionist Origin Story
- 52:12 Do Twelver Sources Claim the Quran Is Corrupted?
- 53:42 Attacking the Companions as an Act of Worship
- 58:41 Honest Critique: The Responsibility of Every Muslim
- 1:03:23 Wala and Bara: Loyalty Has a Gradient
- 1:07:53 Do We Have Solidarity With the Muslims of Iran?
- 1:09:25 Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

## Transcript
**[0:00]** Does Iran's resistance to the United States and Israeli aggression mean that the Shia were right about Islam all along? How much affinity should Sunni Muslims have towards Shia in general or towards Iran specifically?

**[0:16]** Are they the leader of the Axis of Resistance, the allies of the Palestinians, or are they a sectarian monster, a tyrannical force that is spreading evil and mischief throughout the Middle East? We're going to go in-depth in a four-part series looking at Iran from a sectarian lens, from the lens of political theory, from the lens of ummatic struggle for liberation and dignity, and from a geopolitical lens to bring you in touch with Iran like you've never seen before.

**[0:44]** When we talk about Islamic history, it's important to notice that you can fall on two extremes. That sometimes we see that there's an over-emphasis of internal tensions, and sometimes there's the opposite. There's an under-emphasis of internal tensions. So what the over-emphasis looks like, and we can admit this even within Sunni Islam, that there have been times where people were too comfortable, where there were debates that were paid debates, where the courts would bring the madhahib, for example, the fiqh schools.

**[1:12]** Here's the Hanafis, and here's the Shafi'is, and here's the Malikis and the Hanbalis, and we're going to pay a reward or a prize to whoever can out-debate the other one. And I want you to think, was that something that was likely to lead to discovery of the truth, or was it something that was likely to increase rivalry in between people, where people are now incentivized to try to hide the flaws of their own methodology or their own school or their own way in the service of trying to win an argument?

**[1:41]** We find this even with fiqh books, sometimes the way that fiqh manuals were written, that sometimes they were written in very polemical and sectarian ways. Again, even inside of Sunni Islam. So if you look at the differences between the Hanafis and the Shafi'is, you've probably already come across this, where there will be some flippant comment about, you know, well, you have to do this in prayer, and if you don't, then prayer behind such and such a person is invalid.

**[2:09]** And if you're an unsuspecting student of knowledge, you wouldn't really know that this is one madhhab taking a shot at the other and basically upping the stakes, that rather than just saying this is wrong and we believe that this is closer to the truth, that we're going to escalate the consequences of not following our way and saying that if you don't do this, your prayer is invalid and you can't even pray behind somebody who does anything else.

**[2:35]** And this is kind of an interesting thing because we know, or many people know, that when the Ottomans were ruling over the Hijaz and Mecca and Medina, they actually had four different imams, one for each of the Sunni madhahib, leading prayer at the same time.

**[2:50]** So you could follow the imam of your fiqh school. And some people say, oh, that's great, that's the diversity of Islam. And some people are like, well, wait a minute, that seems a little bit weird. Like we're all supposed to be Muslims united in prayer. Even the idea of sawwu safafakum and straighten the rows and fill in the gaps, don't leave any gaps for the shaytan, right?

**[3:09]** And then you're going to have basically four different groups segregated by your law school because they don't believe that prayer behind the other one is valid. I'm not sure if that's the best expression of diversity that we're going for. But anyway, so we've seen in our own history that sometimes the differences between us can be exaggerated.

**[3:29]** And sometimes the differences, and they're very real differences. We'll talk about that in a minute. But they get exaggerated to the point where they not only result in schism and separation and even bigotry, but they can also even result in violence.

**[3:44]** There have been times within Islamic history where Shafi'is and Hanbalis were going at it and things spilled over into community violence. So this is not, I think everybody can agree, especially in 2025, that this is not good. And alhamdulillah, thankfully, Sunni Islam put the lid on a lot of that stuff and was able to de-escalate tensions to the point where today nobody really does that.

**[4:08]** At least the vast majority of people don't do that. People understand that there are differences within the fiqh schools, and that's acceptable. There is another extreme, and that is when we try to under-emphasize the differences between us. We sweep everything under the rug and we say, oh, it's all just the same.

**[4:25]** First of all, it's not true because there are differences between us. And second of all, it really becomes exposed in times where outside actors are trying to leverage the differences between us to cause problems, either problems in our community or to cause problems politically.

**[4:42]** So we don't necessarily want either. We want something in the middle. So the whole purpose of talking about Iran and talking about Shi'ism is not to whip up a sectarian frenzy. It's actually quite the opposite. And by the end of this series, I hope you'll see that and it'll be apparent. But it is also to not try to sweep everything under the rug and just say, well, they're Muslims and we're Muslims and we just have to bury the hatchet.

**[5:04]** Now, there's some real differences, and those differences have actually resulted, unfortunately, in a lot of community violence from both sides. So we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about that, frankly. But here we're going to talk about what are the origins of Shi'ism? Where does it come from? What are the different types of Shia sects that are out there?

**[5:22]** How much is it just about a different interpretation? How much water is there to it or how much credibility is there to their claims? Now, it's important also to note that these categories are not fixed, right? Sunni and Shia, that they have meant different things at different times throughout our almost 1500 year history.

**[5:41]** But just because they're also not fixed, it doesn't mean that they're completely liquid either. Like some people will come, materialists and secularists, and they'll say, oh, well, it really is just people have different beliefs and nobody's a monolith and everybody just has different things that they practice.

**[5:57]** No, each side has a general thrust to it. And there is maybe we could say that there is a lane or a breadth of possibility within each of those lanes. But they're not just liquid. They're not plastic. They do have something that is common within them.

**[6:13]** So we want to get out of that very basic rudimentary observation that, oh, neither side is a monolith. We want to get out of generalities and into specifics. And historically, you know, to complicate the narrative of people that would say, oh, well, they've always been fighting Sunni and Shia, they can never get along.

**[6:29]** That's not really true. Historically, there have been periods of cooperation and unity between Sunni and Shia. And there have also been, of course, periods of bitter rivalry and violence. So we look at the seed. What was the seed that planted the idea of Shi'ism that would eventually grow and grow to become quite a large tree?

**[6:47]** I want you to think about, and we're going to hopefully bring this on screen, Sahih al-Bukhari, two hadith, 4,240 and 4,241. This hadith shows a very, very important insight into the dynamics that took place after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wasallam, and some of the tensions that existed.

**[7:09]** So we have Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, sallallahu alayhi wasallam, radiallahu ta'ala anha, who is approaching Abu Bakr for what she thinks is her right, which is her inheritance of what Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala's messenger, sallallahu alayhi wasallam, had left.

**[7:24]** And it was property that was bestowed from Fadak. It's not going to have a fiqh discussion about what that is. Essentially, Abu Bakr didn't understand the religion that way. He said, no, he said this type of thing is not inherited. The children of the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wasallam, do not have that type of inheritance.

**[7:42]** And this became a cause of disagreement and also of hurt feelings. So Fatimah, radiallahu ta'ala anha, may Allah be pleased with her, was upset with Abu Bakr for the rest of her life, which was six months. She lived six months after the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wasallam.

**[7:57]** She passed away upset at Abu Bakr, radiallahu ta'ala anhu. And Ali, of course, radiallahu ta'ala anhu, as the husband of Fatimah, felt sort of similarly, I'm sure, about this, but also from a different issue,

**[8:12]** which was the fact that the way in which the oath of allegiance, the bay'ah, took place, and the way in which the succession and the khilafah took place. So you all know the story of Saqifah Bani Sa'idah, Abu Bakr and Umar.

**[8:30]** They hear that the Ansar have gathered at Saqifah Bani Sa'idah to decide who's going to lead the Muslim community after the death of the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wasallam. Not wanting them to just go ahead and make a decision and having themselves been aware of certain hadith of the Prophet, sallallahu alayhi wasallam, about maybe who should be in charge,

**[8:50]** they rush to the scene, and it's very famous. Umar ibn al-Khattab suggests or nominates Abu Bakr. Everybody who's present there, they all rally behind Abu Bakr, and then it comes to the main masjid, and everybody rallies behind Abu Bakr and takes bay'ah.

**[9:06]** Ali, radiallahu ta'ala anhu, he delays his bay'ah. He does not give bay'ah to Abu Bakr, radiallahu ta'ala anhu, right away. In fact, he waits six months. He waits, and he doesn't give bay'ah to Abu Bakr until after Fatimah, radiallahu ta'ala anha, passes away.

**[9:25]** And so, huh, that's really strange. What was going on here? I want you to, in your own time, review this hadith very, very carefully. I'm going to just give you a couple little snippets. When Fatimah died, her husband Ali, may Allah be pleased with them both, buried her at night without informing Abu Bakr, and he said the funeral prayer by himself.

**[9:45]** This is a very lonely picture and very lonely scene of Ali burying his wife alone and not even letting people know, at least right away. When Fatimah was alive, the people used to respect Ali very much, but after her death, Ali noticed a change in the people's attitudes towards him.

**[10:04]** That's very important. We'll talk about the significance of that in a second. So, in response to this, Ali sought reconciliation with Abu Bakr and gave him the bay'ah. So, Ali was holding out for these six months. Fatimah passes away. Ali notices people starting to treat him differently and be a little bit distant from him and be a little bit cold to him, which is a subtle form of social pressure.

**[10:27]** Be like, okay, it's time to come back to your senses. And then he decides to reconcile with Abu Bakr. He approaches Abu Bakr. Now, he says, come to us, but let no one come with you. And this is the nass of the hadith, as he disliked that Umar should come.

**[10:46]** Umar said to Abu Bakr, no, by Allah, you shall not enter upon them alone. Abu Bakr says, what do you think they're going to do to me? So, you can tell that there's some mistrust here. We'll talk about what that does and doesn't mean in just a bit. Abu Bakr says, by Allah, I will go to them.

**[11:03]** Abu Bakr goes and Ali utters the tashahhud, ashhadu an la ilaha illallah, Muhammadur rasulullah. And he said to Abu Bakr, we know well your superiority. Very, very important introduction. We know well your superiority and what Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has given you. And he says, we're not jealous of the good that Allah has bestowed upon you.

**[11:23]** Meaning the station of being the leader of the Muslims, amir al-mu'minin, the khalifah. But, you did not consult us in the question of the rule. And we thought that we have got a right in it. Because of our near relationship to Allah's messenger, sallallahu alayhi wasallam.

**[11:40]** The hadith says that Abu Bakr's eyes flowed with tears. And when Abu Bakr spoke, he said, by him in whose hand my soul is, to keep good relations with the relatives of Allah's messenger, sallallahu alayhi wasallam, is more dear to me than to keep good relations with my own relatives.

**[11:57]** But as for the trouble which arose between me and you about his property, which is the reference to what Fatimah's request and complaint was, I will do my best to spend it according to what is good, and will not leave any rule or regulation which I saw Allah's messenger following,

**[12:12]** sallallahu alayhi wasallam. After that, Ali said to Abu Bakr, I promise to give you the bay'ah today, this afternoon. So, after Abu Bakr had finished leading the Dhuhr prayer, he ascended to the pulpit, he said the tashahhud, and then he mentioned the story, what had just happened between him and Ali,

**[12:29]** and Ali's failure to give the oath of allegiance, and excused Ali for that, accepting the excuse that Ali had offered. Then Ali got up, and praying to Allah for forgiveness, he uttered the tashahhud, he praised Abu Bakr's right, and he said that he had not done what he had done because of jealousy of Abu Bakr,

**[12:47]** or as a protest of what Allah has favored him with. But we used to consider that we too had some right in this affair of rulership, and that he, Abu Bakr, did not consult us in this matter, and therefore that caused us to feel sorry.

**[13:02]** All of the Muslims celebrated. This was the end of the awkwardness, the end of the weirdness. On that day, all of the Muslims became happy and said, you did the right thing. The Muslims then became friendly with Ali again, so before they were being cold and a little bit distant,

**[13:17]** and now they changed that, as he returned to what the people had done, and what the people had done here refers to giving the bay'ah to Abu Bakr. Now, what does all of this mean? And I say that this is the seed that grows into the shout,

**[13:36]** or a whisper that grew into a shout, as to some of the dynamics between what happened between some of the companions. I'm going to caveat this by saying, we've heard, or at least I've heard, for many, many years, from Sunni scholars saying, well, we don't want to talk about what happened between the companions,

**[13:53]** or some of the disagreements that they had, fearing that it would decrease people's respect for the companions. Granted, I think in a pre-digital world, that made a lot of sense. But now, with everything available online,

**[14:08]** and with everybody able to share their version of events, and with a crisis of truth, my personal opinion, it's not just my personal opinion, other mashayikh hold this opinion as well, that I follow their lead,

**[14:23]** that to leave this as an empty slate, or a blank slate, or an empty canvas in front of people's minds, has led to much confusion. And it has led to a lot of innuendo being spread. And so we'll see that there's a lot of things being read into this event,

**[14:40]** that simply aren't there. Was this a lifelong grudge held by Ali against Abu Bakr and Umar? Was this a conspiracy of the house of Umayyah, or the Quraysh trying to outmaneuver and push Ali out?

**[14:55]** Or was this just a natural spat, a tiff that happens between even the closest of friends? Notice again that the community treated Ali differently, and distanced themselves from him, until he came back and gave the bay'ah.

**[15:10]** This indicates that everybody understood what was the right thing to do, and they were happy, they were happy, they were not holding a grudge against Ali, if they had been holding a grudge, then they wouldn't have been happy, and welcomed him back, and treated him differently once he made the bay'ah.

**[15:25]** And this is a very similar dynamic, I want to point out something else here, that a lot of scholars, usually Western scholars, usually non-Muslim scholars, but will notice this trend within Shia scholarship as well, that they make a mountain out of a molehill, they take one particular story,

**[15:41]** and they invest so much innuendo into what it means, that it goes beyond what any, I think, reasonable person, could assume that this particular thing means. A classic example would be Abu Hurayrah. There's a lot of stuff about,

**[15:56]** oh is Abu Hurayrah, it becomes a trend every five to ten years or so, you know, Western scholars, Orientalist scholars saying, oh Abu Hurayrah was not reliable, and oh Aisha and Abu Hurayrah had rivalry between them, and she didn't trust him. There are some stories of the companions,

**[16:13]** expressing skepticism to someone having heard it. That even happened with Aisha and Abdullah ibn Umar. Famous hadith of when it comes to, are you allowed to, excuse me, to urinate standing up as a man.

**[16:28]** And Aisha has a hadith indicating that, the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam never did that. But Aisha radiallahu ta'ala anha was not with the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam all the time. Sometimes he was out for jihad, sometimes he was with the guys. And so Abdullah ibn Umar has a hadith indicating that,

**[16:44]** yes, there were a couple situations where the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wasallam did that standing up. And when Aisha heard about Abdullah ibn Umar say that, she had some really, really strong words for him, about like he doesn't know what he's talking about, and etc, etc. Does this indicate, again, are we to read into this,

**[17:00]** and say that, well that means that Abdullah ibn Umar and Aisha were now at war, and they held a grudge. No, it doesn't mean that. It means that they were opinionated people, they had feelings. The companions were human beings that had feelings. And those feelings could be hurt.

**[17:15]** And sometimes when those feelings were hurt, they took time and distance from each other, before coming back, and before regretting it. And that is a very, very similar thing that happened here. You know, the awkward thing though is that, if all you know is this little part of the story, if all you know is that Ali didn't give bay'ah to Abu Bakr right away.

**[17:33]** He waited six months. That's all you know. The story stops there. Now we can play upon your imagination. Oh, what's going on here? So are we to assume that this meant that Ali thought that he should have been the guy? And okay, well, let's ask what that would look like.

**[17:49]** How does Ali respond when Abu Bakr appoints Umar at the end of his life? We find nothing. There's no evidence of him responding in a similar way. There's no evidence of him withholding his bay'ah or anything. So it was really kind of just this one-time thing.

**[18:04]** Thing of, you know, he kind of, he felt like he should have been consulted. And how many times has that happened between in your life or in my life, where somebody kind of makes a decision and you feel like, oh, really? You just went ahead and made that decision and like without me, like I kind of felt like I should have been included in that, right? So what does it mean and what does it not mean?

**[18:20]** Now, let's jump ahead to the next part of this story, which is the council that Umar ibn al-Khattab radiallahu anhu puts together after he's been stabbed. Okay, so he is assassinated, but it takes a few days for him to actually succumb to his wounds. He puts together a council of senior companions that are going to decide on who's going to lead after him.

**[18:42]** And this is another one of these famous stories that is people kind of run with and they take one aspect of it and they read into it things that necessarily aren't there. And often it's actually misrepresented in many, many books written by Orientalist scholars or Western scholars.

**[18:58]** This is Sahih al-Bukhari for those following along at home, 7207. I'm sparing you by going with the English. So I'm going to skip over the part of the story, you know, the beginning. You can read it on your own time. Abdur-Rahman ibn Auf becomes the election officer.

**[19:15]** He basically steps out and says, listen, I don't want to be the leader, but I will, you know, basically run this election process. It comes down to eventually Ali and Uthman who is going to be elected as the caliph. And then Abdur-Rahman ibn Auf, he kind of talks to a lot of people.

**[19:33]** He goes around Medina and in some narrations it says he even like asks the women and children, everybody, how they're feeling about this. He takes shura. And then when he gathers everybody, okay, it says here, let me jump in here. So I called them for him and he consulted them and he called me saying,

**[19:51]** okay, so Abdur-Rahman ibn Auf says, call Ali for me. I called Ali and Abdur-Rahman ibn Auf held a private talk with Ali till very late at night. And then Ali got up to leave having had much hope. Interesting that that's there in the hadith.

**[20:06]** He had much hope that he would be chosen as caliph. But Abdur-Rahman was afraid of something concerning Ali. That's very interesting. It doesn't say what. So Ali is leaving happy thinking he's going to be caliph and Abdur-Rahman ibn Auf is concerned about something.

**[20:24]** Abdur-Rahman then said, call Uthman for me. I called him and he kept on speaking to Uthman privately until fajr. So they stayed up all night to sort this out. When the people finished salat al-fajr and that six-man group gathered,

**[20:39]** that was the council that was to elect the new leader, Abdur-Rahman sent for all of the Muhajirun and all of the Ansar present there and sent for the army chief who had performed the hajj with Umar that year. When all of them had gathered, Abdur-Rahman said:

**[20:56]** None has the right to be worshipped except Allah and added, now then, oh Ali, I have looked at the people's tendencies and noticed that they do not consider anybody equal to Uthman. So you should not incur blame by disagreeing. Very, very interesting choice of words.

**[21:13]** Then Abdur-Rahman said to Uthman, I give the oath of allegiance to you on condition that you will follow Allah's laws and the traditions of Allah's messenger, sallallahu alayhi wasallam, and the traditions of the two caliphs after him. So Abdur-Rahman ibn Auf gave the oath of allegiance to Uthman

**[21:30]** and so did the people that were present, including the Muhajirun and the Ansar and the chiefs of the army staff and all of the Muslims. Notice a couple of important things here. This story is misrepresented in many, many tellings in the English language that I have found.

**[21:47]** When it comes to, and the way in which it is told, is that essentially Abd al-Rahman ibn Auf put the condition to Ali and then Ali rejected it. And that last condition we're talking about, meaning Abd al-Rahman ibn Auf supposedly, allegedly, saying to Ali, I will give you bay'ah

**[22:04]** upon following Allah and following Allah's messenger and following the two companions before you, Abu Bakr and Umar. And the way that the story is told, Ali rejects that third condition and that is what causes Abd al-Rahman ibn Auf to turn to Uthman. There are several, several things wrong with this account

**[22:22]** and we're gonna break it down and go through why that's not possible. First of all, as we just indicated by reading you the hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari, the timeline is off. The condition was not put to Ali first, that the condition is something that was just part of the formula of giving the bay'ah, okay?

**[22:41]** It's like it wasn't as if Ali was approached and only if you do this, are you willing to do this? Then you'll be the caliph. No, that's not how it worked. He only mentioned upon the conditions of following Abu Bakr and Umar when he was ready to, when he had already made his decision and given it to Uthman.

**[22:56]** We also see in the text of the hadith that the reason that Abd al-Rahman ibn Auf gave his bay'ah to Uthman was not because Ali was not willing to accept a condition. It was because he said he looked into the tendencies of the people and no one considers anybody

**[23:16]** equal to Uthman and so then he says, don't incur blame by disagreeing with that. Talk about that in a second. So that's one thing, the timeline is off that things are put out of their proper order to give the impression and we'll talk about

**[23:31]** why this is sort of like revisionist history that Ali was very independent and somehow Uthman was just following orders. Almost as if Uthman was a puppet. The second point, other than the timeline, is that this is a condition that nobody

**[23:48]** would have rejected, a condition of following the example of Abu Bakr and Umar. This is in the hadith itself. Ali would not have refused such a condition. If you go to Jami' al-Tirmidhi, hadith 2,676.

**[24:03]** Okay, famous hadith. The Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, he says that what should you do if you come across the times of fitnah? Fa'alaykum bi sunnati wa sunnati'l-khulafa al-rashidin al-mahdiyin 'addu 'alayha bi'n-nawajidh.

**[24:19]** The Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said, you're gonna see a lot of differing. Beware of newly invented matters. Whoever sees that or reaches that day, they live long enough to see the trials that are gonna happen. What should you do? Stick to my sunnah, says the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam and the sunnah of the rightly guided caliphs.

**[24:37]** Okay, clamp down onto it with your molars. That is an authentic sahih hadith. There's also another hadith in Jami' al-Tirmidhi, hadith 3,799, where the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam actually specifies Abu Bakr and Umar radiyallahu ta'ala

**[24:57]** anhuma. He says, iqtadu, right? He said, follow their way. So if this was general advice and a command for the entire community, it's nonsensical that either Uthman or Ali would have rejected this condition

**[25:12]** as if they're above that. This is something that is very, very well known in the deen. Another thing, so point three, why this is nonsensical is that Ali ibn Abi Talib, may Allah be pleased with him, radiyallahu ta'ala anhu himself, there are so many reports indicating

**[25:30]** that he knew that Abu Bakr and Umar and some reports indicating that he even admitted that Uthman was better than him. Okay, we already touched on that in the previous hadith, the one in Sahih al-Bukhari, where he basically admits that.

**[25:46]** There's a really interesting hadith in Sahih al-Bukhari, hadith 3,671, that is narrated by Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah. That is Ali's son. Now, pay attention really carefully to the wording of this hadith. So Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah says,

**[26:02]** I asked my father, who is Ali ibn Abi Talib, who are the best people after Allah's messenger? He said, Abu Bakr. I asked, then who? Ali said, then Umar. Muhammad then says, I was afraid that he would say Uthman

**[26:21]** if I asked him then who? Which is a beautiful admission of honesty. Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah, he's Ali's son. Of course, you want your father to be the guy. And with who's better, Uthman or Ali, there's a little more ambiguity than with the example of Abu Bakr and Umar.

**[26:37]** So he's hoping that his father is going to say that he's the best one after Umar. So he actually switches it up, the way in which he asks, and he says, rather, then you?

**[26:53]** Instead of saying, then who? He says, then you? Like, you, father, after Umar? And Ali said, I am only an ordinary person. He says, ma ana illa rajulun min al-muslimin. I am just a man among the Muslims. We have many other reports.

**[27:09]** Al-Bayhaqi, for example, he reports that Ali would threaten to whip anybody that he found who claimed that Ali was better than Abu Bakr or Umar, that this is well known. So Ali himself recognizes the virtue as he indicated in that hadith

**[27:25]** when he talks to Abu Bakr, and he says, we recognize your virtue and your superiority over us, and we don't begrudge you of what Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has given you. So this, again, far-fetched that this would be something that Ali would reject. He understood his place, to be frank. The next point is that Uthman was not some yes-man.

**[27:43]** Uthman was not a puppet at all by any stretch of the imagination, that he changed some of the rulings that had existed from the time of Abu Bakr and Umar, because he understood, and all the companions understood, that when the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam is saying to follow the example of the khulafa rashidin al-mahdiyin

**[28:00]** and follow the guidance of Abu Bakr and Umar, that this doesn't mean that you're not allowed to have your own ijtihad, and you're not allowed to do things that are other than what they did. So Uthman did things that were other than what they ruled by.

**[28:15]** In fact, one of the famous examples was what to do with lost camels. He changed the ruling on that. He created this way of gathering lost camels, basically a lost and found for camels, if you will, which was not something that Abu Bakr or Umar had done,

**[28:30]** and it was actually where the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam had been asked to that while he was alive, and he had said to just let them go. Of course, Medina was a very different place in the time of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. In the time of Uthman, it was a bustling metropolis. It had a lot of people. There were thieves, there were bandits. And so this is in fiqh, and when they teach in shari'ah,

**[28:48]** they bring this up as an example of ta'lil, there's a reason behind this ruling, which permits its updating, that you're allowed to change this ruling because it's one that's based on reason, ijtihad. Uthman was also the first person to reconstruct the Prophet's masjid and make it out of stone.

**[29:05]** So previously, it had been built out of palm trunks. And so that was something that was quite bold. It was something that was different. Nobody had done before. So the idea that Uthman was just this yes man that was installed by, I don't know, the hidden hand of the Umayyad conspiracy,

**[29:23]** it just doesn't hold water. It doesn't check out with the other things that we know. It also, we have to debunk the idea, this is one of the things that are mentioned in the apologetics, that Ali was just kind of going along with things for the sake of harmony. We know that the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam said,

**[29:40]** whoever among you sees an evil, then he must change it with his hand. So if Ali really believed that the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam had chosen him to be the leader of the Muslims after the death of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, it would be considered negligent.

**[29:59]** It would be a defect of Ali to not say that, to not pipe up, to not change it with his hand or to do anything or advocate for himself in that way. And that is exactly actually why Abu Bakr and Umar intervened in the way they did at Saqifah Bani Sa'idah

**[30:16]** because they knew the hadith of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam about how the leadership should be from Quraysh and the Ansar are supposed to be the advisors. The Ansar that had gathered haphazardly or spontaneously, let's say, they didn't know that hadith. So because they understood the hadith,

**[30:33]** that they rushed to the scene to try to prevent the community from moving in a way that was contrary to the hadith. And the same thing with Abu Bakr and his position with Fatimah, it landed him in a very awkward situation with Fatimah, but he's following the hadith. That was the way the companions were.

**[30:48]** If there was clear evidence that meant that Ali should have been the leader, then it would have been blameworthy upon Ali to not follow it, to not mention it, to not advocate for himself in that. There's also the inconvenient fact for those who want to make it seem like there's this

**[31:06]** intense rivalry and grudge and hurt feelings that everyone's nursing for a long, long time between Abu Bakr and Umar and Uthman and Ali. Go and look at their kids' names. Go and look at the intermarriage in between all the families. Ali literally has children named Abu Bakr,

**[31:22]** Umar, and Uthman that were born later. Their families are very, very integrated. They have very positive relationships. When Uthman is in his, when he's about to be assassinated, he has a personal guard, like people around him. Guess who's in his personal guard?

**[31:37]** Ali and al-Hasan and al-Husayn. That they are in the personal guard, and they were actually frustrated with Uthman for not allowing them to intervene and prevent him from being assassinated, right? And there's actually one narration where Ali throws down his turban on the ground

**[31:53]** in frustration because Uthman is about to be assassinated, but he's telling Ali and his sons, don't intervene, don't intervene. I don't want to shed the blood of the Muslims. So again, this whole idea of there being this conspiracy or this great sort of grudge, this tremendous falling out,

**[32:11]** it is fiction. It is just, there's a couple stories that do indicate the normal type of disagreements that close people have. And then there's a lot of things that are read into them. What is true, what is true, is that as history continued to move on after the death of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam,

**[32:27]** there was such a thing as a cult of personality forming around Ali as the descendant of the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. And we should observe here, first of all, it's not Ali's fault. Actually, he was very much opposed to it. But we should understand that this is a pattern of shirk,

**[32:44]** that one of the patterns of worshiping other than Allah is the deification of man. That's what the Christians fell into when they tried to elevate or deify 'Isa ibn Maryam alayhi al-salam. And there is this kind of attraction

**[33:00]** to having authority passed down through lineage, like the son or the son-in-law in this case, or the cousin, whatever it may be. It makes it almost a little bit more, well, let's say it plays into other forms of authority. We'll talk more about that when we talk about

**[33:16]** political theory and succession and things of that nature. But there were people, be sure, there were people that actually went to the extent of worshiping Ali. And that is fact, it is documented fact. We have, if you want to check a hadith,

**[33:31]** Sahih al-Bukhari 6,922. By the time that Ali becomes the caliph, there are people that come to him thinking that he is Allah, or worshiping him directly in some way, shape, or form, that Ali then punishes.

**[33:47]** That he punishes, he puts them to death because of this heresy. So that didn't happen with Abu Bakr, that didn't happen with Umar, it certainly didn't happen with Uthman. So what I'm trying to demonstrate here is that there was a cult of personality that had formed. It was a heretical cult of personality.

**[34:03]** Ali did not approve of it and did not like it and tried to stop it. But this is going on in the background that will soon inform a lot of the way that these true stories of disagreements and whatnot are interpreted. So, all right, let's back up.

**[34:20]** If this interpretation, the conspiracy interpretation isn't true, that there wasn't this great rivalry, there wasn't this great grudge, Ali didn't just go along with everything, where does this version of events come from? There are three events in Islamic history that changed everything.

**[34:36]** In fact, they formed a trauma on the Muslim community, especially the early Muslim community. The first, as I just indicated, the assassination of Uthman and the fallout from the assassination of Uthman. After the assassination of Uthman, Ali finally becomes the leader,

**[34:52]** he finally becomes the caliph, and the powerful governor and cousin of Uthman, Muawiyah, up in Sham, refuses to pledge allegiance until the people who killed his cousin are brought to justice. We also have at the same time, Aisha, radiAllahu ta'ala anha,

**[35:08]** making a move with some of the companions, Talha and Zubayr, to gain military support from Kufa in order to do something similar, which is to try to bring to justice the killers of Uthman. And these respectively result in the battles of Siffin

**[35:26]** and of the Battle of the Camel. So this is a fundamental trauma, the first civil war that the Muslims experienced. The second major event that happened is the succession after Muawiyah,

**[35:41]** the accession of Yazid, the son of Muawiyah. If you want to know why, I have my own theory. I think that Muawiyah did what he did. I have a book that I co-authored, Islam in World History. You can find it through Routledge, where I go into a little bit of the psychology. It's not to justify it, but it's very, very strange

**[35:59]** that at the time, after Ali had been assassinated by the Khawarij, there was an expectation and a hope from the partisans of Ali, including some of those people who deified him, that his death would be the end of the world. His son al-Hasan would be the one to take up the mantle and oppose Muawiyah and take him to task.

**[36:17]** Of course, the Prophet ﷺ had prophesied about al-Hasan when he called him a Sayyid. He called al-Hasan a Sayyid, a true leader, because he would be the cause of two great factions of the Muslims uniting. So al-Hasan is the one who abdicated and gave up his right to be the leader of the Muslims on the understanding, conditionally.

**[36:38]** He didn't do it unconditionally, he did it conditionally, on the condition that Muawiyah would then implement shura when it came to appointing his own successor. Now al-Hasan passes away before Muawiyah does. And so what's the status of this agreement?

**[36:54]** Muawiyah doesn't fulfill the conditions of that agreement when it comes to the end of his life. He appoints his own son, Yazid, and this is the start of the second civil war where both Abdullah ibn Zubayr and Husayn refused to give the bay'ah to Yazid.

**[37:11]** And this is what leads to the third major traumatic event that is responsible for all of these interpretations that we're going to go back and make sense for you, is the martyrdom of Husayn, may Allah be pleased with him, in a brutal and horrific fashion at Karbala in today's modern Iraq.

**[37:27]** So when these things are taken into account, and the Prophet's household is treated so poorly, and let's like add a couple other ingredients onto here. You've got the Persian-Arab rivalry, you've got certain Umayyad policies towards the Mawali, the non-Arab converts that are discriminatory, they were.

**[37:48]** It's like throwing lighter fluid on a tiny flame. That the community trauma of watching the grandson of the Prophet ﷺ be so brutally, and his household, much of his household at least,

**[38:04]** be brutally slaughtered, plus everything else that was going on, plus the cult of personality that had developed around Ali and by extension his descendants. This is what leads to a tremendous, it's an engine of retribution, and eventually revisionism.

**[38:24]** So let's take you on the story. One of the first movements to come out of the martyrdom of Husayn was the movement led by a companion. Okay, that companion's name is Sulayman ibn Surad, Surad with a sad. It was called the Tawabeen, the penitent, the repentant.

**[38:43]** They were so regretful of having abandoned Husayn on the day of Karbala and not having come to his aid. There's a lot of history there that we don't have time to get into, but essentially their revolt against Yazid was aborted. It was subverted by a change of governor, and they didn't come to assist Husayn, and that was what led to his martyrdom.

**[39:05]** So the Tawabeen, they say, we're going to go and we're going to challenge these forces. We're going to make up for the fact that we abandoned Husayn. And so you see that all of these emotions are kind of channeled in this one way. The Tawabeen were not very successful, and they were not heretical.

**[39:21]** They did not invent anything new. In fact, like we said, they were led by a companion of the Prophet ﷺ. But the group that takes the reins after that, after the Tawabeen suffer some defeats and are kind of petering out, the next one to arise is al-Mukhtar al-Thaqafi, and this is known as al-Mukhtar's Rebellion.

**[39:39]** Al-Mukhtar is not a companion, and he had some questionable beliefs, which is why actually Abdullah ibn Zubayr refused to ally with him. And al-Mukhtar would actually eventually be killed by Abdullah Zubayr's forces. Al-Mukhtar was much more successful when it came to just the real world objectives of getting revenge on the individual military commanders

**[40:03]** that had been responsible for the slaughter of Husayn and his family. But you see that there's some innovations that are taking place with al-Mukhtar's Rebellion and the kind of cult of personality that he's trying to cultivate. So we mentioned Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah, the son of Ali radiAllahu ta'ala anhu, who was living in the Hijaz at the time.

**[40:21]** Al-Mukhtar really, really wanted the support of Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah. It would have given his movement a lot of credibility. When Abdullah ibn Zubayr is having his counter caliphate, which lasts, by the way, for ten and a half years, he asks Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah to give him bay'ah, and Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah refuses.

**[40:41]** Now, that doesn't mean that Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah goes then and signs up and gives bay'ah to al-Mukhtar, but al-Mukhtar exploited this fact to make it seem like Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah was actually with them. So al-Mukhtar puts himself up as the representative of Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah, even though he's kind of faking it.

**[41:01]** There's no real representation going on. He's doing things without Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyyah knowing what's going on or supporting it. And then he starts to introduce other types of heresies, so they bring relics into battle with them.

**[41:17]** There's a really intense emphasis on Ahl al-Bayt, Ahl al-Bayt, Ahl al-Bayt. This is about the household of the Prophet ﷺ. This becomes taken even further by the next group that takes over after al-Mukhtar is killed,

**[41:34]** which is the Kaysanites, the Kaysaniyyah. The Kaysanites were probably your first, you could call them proto-Shia, you could call them Shia proper. They're probably your first actual identifiable Shia group, and they are the ones that articulate some of the beliefs that even the Shia are known for today, such as imamah,

**[41:54]** the idea that there should be a leader, the leader has to be from the Prophet's house. It cannot be from someone outside of his house, the idea of the ghaybah, of occultation, like what happens when your leader is killed or there's a problem with succession,

**[42:09]** this idea that he's in some mystical realm that's hidden from everybody, and then cursing the rightly guided caliphs, cursing Abu Bakr and Umar and Uthman. Now, this was the dominant Shia sect at the time of the Abbasid revolution.

**[42:27]** They don't exist anymore, but I want to show you how they're responsible for a lot of the ideas and beliefs, and began the process of historical revisionism that then became concrete in some of the later Shia groups that are now dominant today, such as the Twelver groups.

**[42:43]** After the Kaysanites, you get the Hashimiyyah, they were the engine of the Abbasid revolution. There's more to say there, but it's outside of our scope. As I said, this kicks off a project of historical revision and revisionism,

**[42:59]** looking back at many of the events that unfolded, even at the time of the Prophet ﷺ and after, and trying to really bend the interpretation of what was going on,

**[43:14]** without any consistent method, in order to portray a certain prefabricated, predetermined story. And this is why I liken, this is very similar to me to Christianity. And full disclosure, when I was learning more about Islam, there was a brief moment where I started to get interested in Shi'ism,

**[43:31]** and I kind of started reading some things, and I clocked almost immediately how similarly it reminded me of Christianity, in various ways, but one of the ways, and maybe the most problematic way that we're talking about here, is the predetermined conclusion, and then the torturing of the texts in order to meet that conclusion.

**[43:53]** So if we're going to say that this is what happened, now we go back into the books of hadith or whatever, and we accept this because it agrees with what we said, and we're going to reject this, there's no consistent method. Whereas I think, and maybe we'll talk about this a bit more, but one of the most satisfying and convincing aspects of Sunni Islam,

**[44:13]** is the consistent methodology when it comes to what is true, what is authentic, what is not. So, now we need an origin story. How can we justify? What's going to be the origin story? How do we make the claim that Ali, not only should have been the caliph instead of Uthman,

**[44:30]** but really should have been the caliph from the beginning, after the death of the Prophet ﷺ. Enter the event of Ghadir Khumm. You can look at, find this hadith, it's in Sunni sources, it's not a problem about whether it happened or not, the problem is about the interpretation and what does it mean.

**[44:45]** So Sahih Muslim hadith 2408, there is an event at a place called Khumm, or Ghadir Khumm, where the Prophet ﷺ indicates the rights that are due to his house.

**[45:01]** He delivered a sermon at a watering place known as Khumm, situated between Mecca and Medina. He praised Allah, extolled Allah, and delivered the sermon and exhorted us to saying, now to our purpose, people, I'm a human being, I'm about to receive a messenger, and this is foretelling his death from my Lord, and I, in response to Allah's call, would bid goodbye to you, but I'm leaving among you two weighty things.

**[45:21]** One being the Book of Allah, in which there is right guidance and light, so hold fast to the Book of Allah and adhere to it. He exhorted us to hold fast to the Book of Allah and then said, the second are the members of my household, and I remind you of your duties to the members of my family, who are the members of his household?

**[45:39]** What about his wives? It was responded to him, his wives are members of his family, but here the intent is those who zakat is forbidden for them, and that is Ali and the offspring of Ali, Aqeel and the offspring of Aqeel, and Jafar and the offspring of Jafar, and Abbas and the offspring of Abbas.

**[45:57]** That is the group of people who are considered Ahl al-Bayt, that zakat is not allowed for them. So, what does this mean? The event of Ghadir Khumm, does it mean that this was, of course, today's Shia, they say that, well, this is where Ali was designated by the Prophet ﷺ,

**[46:13]** both in the external, exoteric way of he should be the leader of the community, but then also in the esoteric way that there was certain knowledge that was passed from the Prophet ﷺ to Ali, that only Ali had. I think that you can tell from the text that a lot of that is read into it,

**[46:29]** that it doesn't necessarily indicate that, and there are similar hadith about following Abu Bakr, people wondering about who should they ask, there was a lady that was with the Prophet ﷺ visiting, and then she was going to go back to her homeland, and she said, if we come back, who should we ask, and who should we follow,

**[46:46]** and he responds, Abu Bakr. So there are similar hadith about other companions. Does it mean that Ali should have been the first caliph, or the first imam, the leader of the community? That's a bit of reading into it. If Ali was supposed to inherit the leadership from the Prophet ﷺ,

**[47:01]** then it's not just Yazid who is a usurper, but Muawiyah is a usurper as well, and it's not just Muawiyah who's a usurper, but it's also Uthman and Aisha as well, and it's not just them, but it's also Abu Bakr and Umar as well, and it's not just them,

**[47:16]** but it's in fact all of the companions who let it happen and stood by and watched, except for a few. So all of the previous events that we talked about now get reinterpreted. Abu Bakr's actions and intervention at Saqifah Bani Sa'idah are not in good faith anymore.

**[47:32]** They're a deliberate conspiracy trying to shut out Ali and keep him in the dark. Ali delaying and giving the bay'ah is not just because he felt a little bit salty about not being consulted, it's because he knows that he's supposed to be the caliph and the leader.

**[47:47]** Abu Bakr denying Fatimah her request is now, again, another conspiracy against Ahl al-Bayt itself, about anyone from the Prophet's household kind of on the outside looking in, and Abdurrahman ibn Awf's pledge to Uthman becomes this coup, right, where it's denied to Ali yet again,

**[48:06]** and the House of Umayyah or the whatever we're going to call it, establishment, is sort of kind of keeping Ali on the outside. So we see that all of these events are now reinterpreted to fit this story of Ali having been denied something that was rightfully his from the beginning, and here we go.

**[48:24]** Now we're into Shi'ism proper. This account of things creates a crisis and commitment to this account. We can't just say, oh, you believe in this and we believe in that, and that's the end of the day. No, believing in events according to this interpretation, this narrative that the Shia have constructed over history,

**[48:45]** is disadvantageous and it creates several crises that we're going to go through and several fundamental contradictions in a snap. To get there, actually a really interesting book that, if you have the ability to review,

**[49:00]** is written by Yusuf al-Qaradawi. So Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Shaykh Yusuf, a very, very famous shaykh, he actually committed to attempts to build bridges between Sunni and Shia. He wrote a book in 2004, basically calling for these bridges being built and intersectarian dialogue,

**[49:18]** and it's not that bad, guys, let's bury the hatchet and let's come to a mutual understanding. Almost 20 years later, after having spent a lot of his time and energy committed to this project, he writes another book, essentially regretting a lot of lost time,

**[49:33]** and he kind of becomes jaded and skeptical of this entire project. So he concedes in this later book that his earlier optimism was based in just a cursory knowledge of Shia doctrine, and now in this later book he's going directly to, we're going to talk about Twelver Shi'ism first,

**[49:49]** that's the Shi'ism that is the official state religion of Iran, but later we will talk about other different sects of Shi'ism. So he's going into Twelver sources directly and quoting them, and he sees extremely sharp points of divergence from Sunni Islam, some of which are just mutually exclusive.

**[50:07]** Now, if you want to do your own research, here's Cliff's notes on some of the major authoritative Shia works, again we're talking Twelver Shia, their version of Bukhari and Muslim would be, there's four major canonical books of hadith,

**[50:22]** one is al-Kafi by Muhammad ibn Ya'qub al-Kulayni, this is the most comprehensive Twelver hadith collection, it's got over 16,000 narrations. Another one, Man La or Ma La Yahduruhu al-Faqih by Ibn Babawayh al-Qummi,

**[50:40]** this is a hadith text that's focused on practical jurisprudence and rituals, emphasizing the imam's guidance, it's the second of the four books. The next one, Tahdhib al-Ahkam by Shaykh al-Tusi, the last one, Tafsir al-Qummi by Ali ibn Ibrahim al-Qummi,

**[50:56]** this is an exegesis, but it is very, very much relying on narrations from the imams. It's a foundational Shia tafsir book. There's other books, Bihar al-Anwar by Muhammad al-Baqir al-Majlisi, Majlisi is a major deal, Safavid Shia scholar, he'll come up later.

**[51:15]** Ikhtiyar Ma'rifat al-Rijal by Muhammad ibn Umar al-Kashshi, which is a critical biography of dictionaries, and this is, we should also clarify at this point that this is the Akhbari tradition, so there's two main traditions of Twelver Shi'ism,

**[51:30]** the Akhbari tradition, which is more based in these narrations and these books of hadith, and the Usuli tradition, which is a little bit different, and we'll talk more about those differences later. A ton of Usuli sources, if you want to look into it, al-Muqni' by al-Sharif al-Murtada,

**[51:45]** Kifayat al-Usul by Shaykh Muhammad al-Hasan al-Najafi, al-Lum'ah al-Dimashqiyyah by Shahid Thani, Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisi, Sharh al-Tahdhib, and there's various, as you can tell, secondary books that are explaining some of the other books. I have ten here listed, I'm not going to read all of them.

**[52:02]** What did Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi find in his review of Shia sources that disturbed him so much, that made him sour on the project and so skeptical? One of the things was he found a consistent claim that the Qur'an has been corrupted,

**[52:17]** and the Qur'an is incomplete, and the Qur'an is not authentic in various degrees. So he highlights passages in authoritative Akhbari sources, particularly al-Kulayni's al-Kafi and al-Qummi's Tafsir, that explicitly assert tahrif, the claim that the Qur'an has been altered.

**[52:32]** These texts describe the present codex, which is shared by Sunnis, Shias, and Ibadis alike. They're using the same Qur'an, but in their books they're claiming that the Qur'an that they use is incomplete or corrupted. Some reports allege that the original Qur'an contained 17,000 verses,

**[52:50]** rather than the 6,000 some that are found today. And that, of course, what was removed were the verses that praise the Prophet's family, or condemn Abu Bakr or Umar. Now, you should realize that part of the Usuli tradition, and why the Usuli Twelver tradition is more prominent now,

**[53:08]** is because it tries to reinterpret a lot of that, and it tries to make apologia for a lot of these earlier claims, which are quite alarming and outlandish. So Usuli apologists will deny this, they insist that those earlier references to additions or omissions are mistakes,

**[53:25]** or other things like that. And there's an argument that no authoritative Shia figure has ever really upheld that doctrine. But Qaradawi is not convinced in his book by this defense, and he points out, again, he goes right to al-Kafi, page 202, there's nothing ambiguous about the claims that are being made about the Qur'an.

**[53:41]** The second point is the corruption of the Sunnah. If they're going to claim that the Qur'an is corrupt, then what do you think they're going to say about the Sunnah? And this is what we're going to distinguish here between the Twelvers and the Zaydis, sometimes called as Fivers, who accept the Sunni canonical hadith collections.

**[53:56]** Twelvers reject them in favor of the later works that we mentioned previously. Al-Qaradawi, reviewing those works, he finds them very unreliable and contradictory. First of all, only a small fraction of their hadith that are in their books, trace back to the Prophet ﷺ. The majority of them are attributed to the imams,

**[54:13]** which, we'll see later. We'll talk about more later, especially Ja'far al-Sadiq, and these are often through weak or fabricated chains of transmission. Al-Qaradawi also identifies, again, these major Shia canonical works of hadith and their authors, and he contrasts their different methodologies. He highlights what he sees as pervasive flaws in Shia hadith literature, internal contradictions, contradictions of the Qur'an, reports that are irrational or implausible. He also notes that Shia sources themselves acknowledge widespread fabrication,

**[54:44]** including statements attributed to imams of Ahl al-Bayt that lament that false reports are being ascribed to them. On this basis, al-Qaradawi presents a deeply critical portrait of the Twelver Shia tradition, hadith tradition, as one that's built on unreliable foundations.

**[54:59]** And the last claim, which is that the companions, and this is something that erodes Islam at its very root. Al-Qaradawi highlights how Twelver texts often portray the Prophet's companions in an extremely negative light.

**[55:16]** It brands them as disbelievers, as apostates, and it preaches cursing the companions as a form of worship. Al-Qaradawi highlights the severity of Shia Akhbari reports concerning the Prophet's companions. In al-Kulayni's al-Kafi, for example, there's 33 reports under a chapter title,

**[55:34]** The Blessings of the Companions, Their Betrayal, Apostasy, and Breach of Trust After the Prophet's Death. And there are narrations that explicitly claim that the companions broke their trust and became apostates after the Prophet ﷺ died. In al-Tusi's Rijal al-Kashshi, the companions are described under the heading Ahl al-Riddah, the people of apostasy.

**[55:54]** And the claim there is that all the companions, except for three of them, apostated. And the three that didn't are apparently Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, al-Miqdad, and Salman al-Farisi. So al-Qaradawi, he underscores in his book, this is pretty extreme stuff, right?

**[56:09]** This is like really extreme takfir. It's far worse than anything that you would find in any Sunni book. Or even that the Khawarij were doing. As bad as the Khawarij were, you don't find such mass takfir as you do in these Twelver Shia books.

**[56:25]** Now, if you get into other, like Majlisi's Rijal al-Kafi, similar claims. All the companions, except for three, became disbelievers and left Islam. There is various reinterpretation of the Qur'an that is supposedly indicative of that.

**[56:40]** So for example, when the Qur'an says, don't follow the footsteps of the Shaytan. Al-Majlisi says that that means Abu Bakr and Umar. Don't follow the steps of Abu Bakr and Umar. That's quoting from Tafsir al-Ayyashi, actually. And many, many other similar reports. I think you get the idea. How can you claim to believe in a religion that is handed down from people and transmitted by people,

**[57:01]** that you then said broke their trust and left the religion and betrayed everything? To be quite frank, there's no deen without the companions. There's absolutely no such thing as Islam without the companions. There's no Qur'an, let alone hadith. There's nothing.

**[57:16]** The companions are the ones that faithfully transmitted that, so that we have that today. And I think that there's a relationship here between some of the imaginative, let's say, interpretations and this erosion of the companions' authority. Because if you strip the deen of the companions and all you have is this Qur'an

**[57:34]** and whatever weak reports are attributed to the imams, then you can kind of come along and say, well, it means anything. It means whatever you want it to mean. And if someone's going to come to you and say, well, no, well, Abdullah ibn Abbas said that that means this. And Abdullah ibn Umar said that that means that.

**[57:50]** They'll be like, oh, well, they just left Islam after the Prophet ﷺ died. So it's a little bit convenient. So again, Qaradawi stresses that Sunnis have never engaged in this reciprocal level or an equal level of takfir or hostility towards Ahl al-Bayt.

**[58:05]** While Twelver texts often vilify key Sunni figures and actually make it into an act of worship. And somebody can argue, yes, okay, that is the Akhbari sources. But when it comes to the Usuli sources that they kind of straightened it out.

**[58:21]** But Qaradawi goes there as well. And he says, not really. That even if you look at Khomeini, right? Ayatollah Khomeini, Ruhullah is his actual name. And he's an Usuli. And his Usuli interpretations, you'll find the interpretations kind of strained, inconsistent, and evasive on some points.

**[58:40]** So Qaradawi, what he comes to, his main, I guess, rejoinder. He says that, listen, we can't really have the type of unity that we have to have. Unless Shias are going to repudiate and disavow some of these claims.

**[58:57]** Everybody has a responsibility to call out falsehood. You know, Allah SWT says in the Qur'an to be witnesses for truth and for justice. Even when it's against yourselves or against your family, etc., etc. So if there's something within your own tradition that's just wrong.

**[59:14]** We have a duty to speak about it, right? Don't leave it for someone who's, somebody else either outside of Islam or from a different sect or whatever to call it out. You should call it out yourself. And that goes right back to Sunni Muslims as well.

**[59:29]** If we have something similar, we should own the problems in our own tradition. Realizing that we're talking about a very, very different level of scale here. Let's take the sectarianism that I referred to earlier with Sunni and intra-Sunni debates and animosity.

**[59:45]** And those are things that we can own and say that's a mistake. And there's incendiary language and escalation needlessly. And we need to own that. We need to fix that. So al-Qaradawi's final point is that Shias have to take accountability for these claims and actually leave them behind.

**[1:00:03]** Because if you don't, sectarian preachers are always going to come back and quote these. Like even let's say for the sake of argument that people don't believe these things today, they're still on the books and preachers will reach for them and quote them on the minbar and in Friday sermons and in lessons. And that's going to stir up hatred and animosity and it does.

**[1:00:21]** So there's a responsibility here to disavow these types of things. And Khomeini doesn't get off the hook either. Al-Qaradawi goes into Khomeini's works. And even though he's an Usuli, I mean similar things. Like Khomeini makes takfir of non-Shia Muslims in various places.

**[1:00:37]** He disparages the major Companions. He exalts the 12 Imams of Shia Islam above the prophets and the angels except for the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. There's even passages within his treatises on Islamic government where Khomeini appears to claim for himself all the authorities that were once held by the Prophet ﷺ. Al-Qaradawi is like this is not moderation.

**[1:00:59]** This person actually represents a fringe. Al-Qaradawi's last point also highlights the internal critics of Twelver Shiaism. So there's two in particular. Dr. Musa al-Musawi who is a Shia. He's a Twelver Shia but he's criticizing Twelver Shia from the inside and saying similar things.

**[1:01:14]** Al-Qaradawi is saying in fact al-Qaradawi patterns many of his own criticisms on the works of Dr. Musa al-Musawi. And Ayatollah Husayn al-Bulqai is the second one. And unfortunately when these internal critics try to open up a conversation they are punished.

**[1:01:31]** Sometimes they're tortured or arrested by their governments or they're disavowed and people wash their hands of them rather than engage in honest critique. And that's really all we're talking about here.

**[1:01:46]** We're talking about honest critique and everybody should be able to engage in honest critique of themselves. Because what's the goal? Is the goal here to defend our team and to defend our side against the other side? That's sectarianism.

**[1:02:02]** Or is the goal to get to the truth? And we hold everybody to this expectation. Sunni, Shia, Christian, anybody. We hold people to the expectation that you're going to look for the truth. We should be willing to admit when we've been wrong. That's actually a tremendous skill and a much needed moral position. So if you want further reading on this Asad Ahmed has a book called The Religious Elite of the Early Islamic Hijaz.

**[1:02:20]** Where he goes into some of these early relationships between figures and this revisionism that we're talking about. And how early stories are reinterpreted in light of Shia theological claims about Ali and what he was supposed to have. And the Imam and all of these things.

**[1:02:41]** Now to be completely clear, when we are in the project of trying to get to the truth. And that's what we're calling everybody to. Sunnis, Shias, everybody. Try to get to the truth. And be critical of your own tradition. And be frank when your tradition has gone astray or has picked up something along the way that doesn't belong there.

**[1:02:56]** This does not equate to dehumanization of anybody. And that's a really important thing. Some people unfortunately they make it seem like you have to agree with everybody. And if you disagree with somebody or if you have a criticism of their religion or their religious beliefs.

**[1:03:13]** And that means that that leads to dehumanization. And then you're going to trample upon their rights. Absolutely not. This actually comes to the main point of this episode. Which is what are the limits of our affinity towards the Shia of Iran or beyond. Like as Sunni Muslims, what are their rights upon us?

**[1:03:33]** We have a concept in Islam called al-wala' wal-bara'. And this is a very central concept of loyalty and disavowal. It means that as Allah says in Surah al-Ma'idah, إِنَّمَا وَلِيُّكُمُ اللَّهُ وَرَسُولُهُ وَالَّذِينَ آمَنُوا

**[1:03:48]** Your only allies and protectors and close friends are Allah and the Messenger and those who believe. So how far does that circle expand? Who are the believers?

**[1:04:04]** Can we disagree? Or of course we're going to disagree. How much can we disagree? Until that title of believer doesn't apply anymore. To be clear, loyalty and disavowal gets a bad rap. It has a bad reputation because some groups like al-Qaeda and Daesh have weaponized it to justify wanton violence against innocent Muslims.

**[1:04:23]** Which is really super ironic because the whole thing is originally meant to be this is where we draw the border between a Muslim and a non-Muslim and we're supposed to have certain rights upon us as Muslims. So groups like al-Qaeda have perverted that and turned it against people inside of the fold of Islam.

**[1:04:38]** People who uphold the five pillars and say that the logic and unfortunately I've heard this from people that they're worse than the kuffar. Like the internal enemy or the internal rival that doesn't agree or doesn't have exactly the same aqidah that you have

**[1:04:53]** or doesn't follow exactly the same things. They're actually worse than people who don't believe in Islam at all. No actually, no.

**[1:05:08]** That when it comes to wala' and bara', there's a gradient and we're going to get into this. And even when it comes to people who, like how far does that circle expand? And what are our rights upon other people? Or what are their rights upon us? There's a gradient. But this also, let's not confuse it with the opposite extreme which is sort of the apologists and the reformists.

**[1:05:23]** They're trying to say, people will even say that wala' and bara', loyalty and disavowal is a completely made up concept and this is why Islam, this is why terrorism happens and things like that. That's extremely simplistic and it's not honest.

**[1:05:38]** Al-wala' wal-bara' is in the Qur'an. Absolutely. It is a central belief in aqidah. It's mentioned in Abu Hanifa's aqidah treatise or at least the treatise that's attributed to him. It's very much a classical indigenous Islamic concept. It's not a modern invention.

**[1:05:55]** However, it can be done right and it can be done wrong just like anything else. And so historically, historically, Sunni Islam measured its loyalty through iman with gradation. Meaning it's not black and white.

**[1:06:11]** It's not all or nothing. That every believer is understood to deserve a measure of love and loyalty because of their commitment to the two testimonies. And to the extent that they're Muslim.

**[1:06:26]** If you're fulfilling the five pillars, if you're praying towards Mecca, all of these things, that there is a right that that person has upon you as another Muslim. Even if you have very, very deep disagreements and critiques about some of the other things that they believe and practice. And of course like the top of the gradient is that somebody who checks all the boxes.

**[1:06:42]** Is someone who's going to be entitled to your full love and your full allegiance and those sorts of things. But when it comes to the process of excluding people. This is actually the way of the Shia and the Khawarij.

**[1:06:58]** Like they're splinter groups. They're the ones that apply the principles of wala' and bara' to other Muslims. Actually the majority of the Muslim community. The early Sunnis were very careful to not make takfir. And not make especially reckless takfir on whole entire groups of people.

**[1:07:13]** And also not to disavow of people indiscriminately. And an example of this is that you can find Shia narrators in the books of hadith. In the Sunni books of hadith. You can find even Khawarij narrators in Sahih al-Bukhari, in Sahih Muslim and in the other ones. Compare this to something I've heard from people in modern times.

**[1:07:32]** Don't even take chocolate from an innovator. What? Don't even take chocolate from an innovator? And there are Shia narrators in Sahih al-Bukhari? Like something doesn't work here.

**[1:07:48]** Like you have to make those two things make sense. So the verdict here. Shia or not. Muslims deserve a certain amount of affinity and loyalty from all Muslims worldwide. When we see our brothers and sisters in Iran being subject to aggression. At the hands of the U.S. and Israel.

**[1:08:05]** Or at the hands of anybody. Our heart goes out to them. Like we have that affinity as not just as human beings. And we do have a degree of affinity towards all human beings as being created by Allah. But specifically as Muslims. As people who uphold five pillars.

**[1:08:20]** Who pray towards Mecca. Who have the same Qur'an that we have. Regardless of things that we have very, very severe critiques and criticisms of. Now hold on. You're going to say, well wait. You didn't answer one of the questions that you put out in the beginning. Is Iran able to stand up to Israel and the U.S. because it's Shia?

**[1:08:35]** Now the answer to that question is partially yes. Shiaism is very much an insurgent, extremely politicized religious ideology. We're going to get into that more with the subsequent episodes.

**[1:08:51]** But we're also going to show in later episodes how the sectarianism within Shiaism. Is ultimately a limit and a liability for the liberation of the Ummah. So does that mean that the Shia version of Islam is true? I hope that you can see from all the material that we've presented here. That the answer is a definitive no.

**[1:09:08]** The subsequent episodes in this miniseries are going to explore other factors that are involved. Such as why does Iran remain defiant while the Sunni majority governments are collaborating with Israel and the U.S. against Palestine. And no one should misunderstand the purpose of this video into going into the details of what we disagree about.

**[1:09:24]** Nobody should understand it as to undermine that solidarity. Not at all. In fact, I believe that the very purpose is to enable genuine solidarity. Because people calling upon us to ignore or downplay differences. Ultimately, they ring hollow.

**[1:09:41]** And in fact, they actually sow suspicion. Because you're being told to just suspend your brain and just turn off your brain. When you know that they believe in stuff that's very different from you. You don't quite know what or the details of it. But you're being asked to support them or to feel for them in some certain way.

**[1:09:56]** That's only going to lead to suspicion. That's not going to lead to any solidarity whatsoever. Just as provocatively exaggerating the differences is not going to get us anywhere. And is going to lead to dehumanization.

**[1:10:13]** We want a middle ground. We want a middle way between those two extremes. You know, Robert Frost, one of my favorite poets. He has a line where he says, good fences make good neighbors. And I find that profound. And I try to meditate on that quite a bit. Identifying precisely the border between us and Twelver Shia.

**[1:10:28]** Is actually what clarifies the precise shape and extent of our solidarity and cooperation. We have to know where the difference is. We can say that Islam is a house or the Ummah is a house. And every house has rooms in it.

**[1:10:45]** And maybe they're in one room and we're in another. Maybe they're down the hallway. Maybe we're on different floors. But the thickest wall in every house is the exterior wall. That at the end of the day, they're in the house.

**[1:11:00]** And when we understand where they're at and where we're at. We can actually fulfill the commandment of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. When he says in Surah al-Ma'idah verse 2. Allah says, work together, cooperate, assist one another in goodness and righteousness.

**[1:11:15]** And Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala does not qualify that. To say only if they agree in everything that you believe in. No, you work together in goodness and righteousness no matter what. No matter who is working towards goodness and righteousness.

**[1:11:31]** Or as Malcolm had said, we're for the truth no matter who says it. That people are right when they're right and they're wrong when they're wrong. And we can be able to have frank conversations about what we disagree with other people. Without throwing them under the bus and completely eliminating their rights upon us. That's all for this episode.

**[1:11:50]** On the next episode, we're going to get into political theory. How Islamic is the Islamic Republic of Iran? Is it just a nation state like any other nation state that's utilizing religion conveniently? Or is it really an Islamic government? Or is it really an Islamic government?

**[1:12:15]** For more UN videos visit www.un.org you

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