THE SCRIPTURE OF ALI AL-RIDA

صحیفہ امام رضا

I was searching for Jonathan Andrew Cleveland Brown's views on Shiite Muslims when I found his hour-long discourse on the sahifah of Ali b. Musa al-Rida (علی ابن موسیٰ الرضا) or, as Iranians are proud to call him, the Imam Reza. You can easily watch this lecture online by clicking this link. I was quite surprised to learn that such a scripture exists and my unawareness baffled me initially. According to Professor Brown, this pro-Shiite (but not anti-Sunni) sahifah had caught the eye of some prominent Sunni Muslim clerics and shows how the hadith traditions of these two rival schools in Islam are overlapped, interlinked and inter-dependent. Here we have a hadith collection that was transmitted by the 8th Shiite imam to his student in Qazvin (Iran) and we see multiple Sunni scholars (such as Ibn Abi Hatim, Khatib al-Baghdadi & etc.) authenticating it.

Imam Ali b. Musa al-Rida was the son of the 7th Shiite imam Musa b. Jafar al-Kadhim. Musa was the son of the 6th Shiite imam Jafar b. Muhammad al-Sadiq, the teacher of multiple Sunni giants such as Abu Hanifah. Jafar was the son of Muhammad b. Ali al-Baqir, 5th Shiite imam. Muhammad was the son of Ali b. Husayn, the 4th Shiite imam who is considered by Sunni Muslims to be one of the most pious and the most learned scholars of his time. Ali was the son of Husayn b. Ali, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad who lost his life in the Battle of Karbala (680 CE). Husayn was the son of Ali b. Abu Talib, the son-in-law of Prophet Muhammad. Ali al-Rida narrates this sahifah from his ancestors and takes it all the way back to the Prophet of Islam. Professor Brown explains how this sahifah was massively circulated in a very hardcore Sunni city of Qazvin where they gave a special importance to the incident when Ali al-Rida arrived in their city in the beginning of the 9th century CE.

Ali al-Rida (766/148-818/202) was born in the Abbasid Empire. His grandfather Jafar had to witness the deaths of many of his clan members (Alids) when one of his cousins revolted against the tyranny of the Abbasid emperor Mansur. After the death of Jafar, Shiites split into two factions: the mainstream Shiites continued with the imamah of Musa but a minority insisted that Jafar's elder son Isma'il was the rightful successor to his father. Musa suffered fourteen years of imprisonment by the hands of the emperor Harun. After the death of Harun, his sons Muhammad al-Amin and Abdullah al-Mamun clashed for the throne of Baghdad. This sibling rivalry was a golden chance for some of the Hashimites to rebel against the Abbasids. But Ali al-Rida refused to bear arms and promoted patience in face of tyranny. Finally, Amin was decapitated by one of Mamun's generals when they attacked his capital and the victorious brother was sworn as the sole Caliph of the Islamic World (aside from fringe empires in Africa and Spain). Mamun was sympathetic towards the cause of the Alids so he announced the name of Ali al-Rida as his heir-apparent. Ali was brought from Medina to Tus (Meshad, Iran) and sworn as the next Caliph of Islam. But he died under suspicious circumstances, presumably by poising by an Abbasid anti-Alid minister. Mamun buried him next to his father where today lies the massive shrine of Imam Reza, the cultural icon of a Shiite Iran.

While Ali al-Rida was traveling from Medina to Tus, he is reported to have made a brief stop at the city of Qazvin. It was at Qazvin where he transmitted this manuscript to his student Abu Ahmad Da'ud b. Sulayman b. Yusuf b. Ahmad al-Ghazi. Da'ud transmitted this book to Muhammad b. Ali Mahrawayh (d. 335 AH). Mahrawayh brought this manuscript to Baghdad with him. This book is usually known as Musnad Imam Reza. Read the complete chain of transmission here. But the version I have on my computer in PDF was transmitted by Imam in Medina (in the year 193 AH) to his student Ahmad b. Amir b. Sulayman al-Ta'i. All the reports in this sahifah are pro-Shiite but not anti-Sunni. Some are just little harmless anecdotes about piety and asceticism. Let me quote some hadiths from this scripture:

1. No god but God is my fort. Whoever entered my fort, became immune from my wrath.

2. Who gives people a fatwa without knowledge, the angels of heavens and earth curse at him.

3. One who performs an obligatory action, God accepts his one prayer.

4. He who abuses a prophet is executed and he who abuses a companion of the prophet is flogged.

5. I only named my daughter Fatimah because God will give salvation  from hell-fire to her and salvation to him who loved her.

6. Beware of injustice for it destroys your hearts.

7. No milk is better for a toddler than the milk of his/her mother.

8. The master of the foods of this world and the other world is meat; the master of the foods of this world and the other world is water; and I am the master of the descendants of Adam but there is no pride in it instead my pride is piety.

9. Stars protect the people of the heavens and my Ahlul Bayt protect my community.

10. I am the city of knowledge and Ali is its gate. So, whoever wants knowledge, he should come from the gate.

This sahifah has some 200+ hadiths and all of them can be found in the major books of Shiite Muslims that were compiled by our top-notch muhaddithin. Professor Brown, in his lecture, also gives the audience a little taste of the sahifah. This scripture is a doorway between the hadith corpus of the two major Muslim sects. He also mentions a Shiite scholar named Ibn Uqdah (and Brown has penned down a brief but comprehensive article about that guy) who was also a hadith critic of the Sunni Islam, a well-respected personality among the two rival schools. May Allah give Muslims of this era the guts to become like Ibn Uqdah!