‫‪Henry Corbin‬‬

‫‪In Iranian Islam‬‬

‫» ‪« The Spiritual Combat of Shi'ism‬‬
‫‪vol. I, pp. 79-110‬‬

‫]‪Henry Corbin [1903-1978‬‬

‫‪Lord have Mercy on him, al-Fâtihah‬‬

‫ٱلر ِح ِم )‪(1‬‬ ‫ٱلر ۡح َم ٰ ن ﱠ‬ ‫ۡسم ٱ ِ ﱠ‬

‫ِ ِ ُ‬
‫ٱل َح ۡمد ِ ِ رب ٱلع ل ِم )‪(2‬‬
‫َ‬ ‫ٰ‬ ‫َ‬ ‫ﱢ‬ ‫َ‬
‫ٱلر ِح ِم )‪(3‬‬ ‫ٱلر ۡح َم ٰ ن ﱠ‬ ‫ﱠ‬
‫َۡ ﱢ‬
‫َم ٰ ِل ِك يو ِم ٱلدين )‪(4‬‬
‫َ َ َ‬ ‫َ َ ُ‬
‫ِإ ﱠ اك ن ۡع ُ د َو ِ ﱠ اك ۡست ِع ُ )‪(5‬‬
‫َ‬ ‫َ‬ ‫ۡ َ‬
‫ٱه ِدنا ٱل ﱢ َ ٰ ط ٱل ُم ۡست ِق َم )‪(6‬‬
‫َ‬ ‫ۡ‬ ‫َ ٰ َط ٱلذ َ‬
‫ين أن َع ۡمت َعل ۡي ِه ۡم‬ ‫ِ‬ ‫ِ‬
‫َ‬ ‫َ ۡ ۡ ََ ﱠ‬ ‫َۡ َ ۡ ُ‬
‫وب علي ِهم و ٱلضال )‪(7‬‬ ‫ِ‬ ‫ض‬ ‫غ‬ ‫م‬ ‫غ ٱل‬

‫‪Translation from French‬‬

 *
ٰ
‫الرحمن الرح م‬ ‫سم ﷲ‬
‫اللهم صل ع محمد وآل محمد‬

About the author :

Henry Corbin, born on April 14, 1903 in Paris and died on
October 7, 1978 in the same city, was a French philosopher,
translator and Orientalist.
In 1933, he married Stella Leenhardt (1910-2003) who
became the inseparable companion and collaborator of all his
work.
He is one of the few philosophers to deal with Iranian Islam
in general and Shiite gnosis in particular.
Corbin translated, interpreted and edited some of the
classics of this tradition, whose great names such as
Sohrawardi, Molla Sadra Shirazi, Rûzbehân Baqlî Shîrâzî and
also the Sufi Ibn Arabi and his Shi'ite disciple Haydar Amoli,
are gradually broadening a philosophical horizon that is also
becoming globalized. (fr.wikipedia.org)

Henry Corbin and his wife Stella Lennhardt with whom he is buried in the
cemetery of Montmorency in the Val-d'Oise (95) in France.

1
2
 [Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien, vol. I, p. 79-110] : « (...) It
is still important to say more, in order to dissipate the
equivocation created in the West by the use of a terminology
speaking of « Shi'ite legitimism » or Shi'ism as the cause of
the « legitimists » in Islam. No, the cause of the Imâms does
not represent a dynastic legitimism in competition with any
rival dynaste of this world, any more, as we have already said,
than the dynasty of the Grail is in competition with a dynasty
of this world or with the succession of the Apostolic See. It is
ridiculous to reduce the question to these terms of rivalry.
Rivalry is only possible between two different worlds; the
world of malakût dominates the world of our competitions
from too high a level to have to compete with it.
On this point, it is precious for us to gather the testimony,
among others, of an eminent theosophist of the Safavid period,
Qazî Sa'îd Qommî (ob. 1103/1691), in his monumental
commentary of a work of one of the most ancient Shi'ît
doctors, Shaykh Sadûq Ibn Bâbuyeh. He writes: « It is well
established by Tradition that the Messenger of God, after he
was given the choice between being a servant and a king,
chose to be a servant-prophet ('abd nabî), not a king-prophet
(malik nabî). Therefore, there can be no exoteric kingship
(saltanat zâhira, i.e. temporal) for him, nor any sovereignty of
the kind exercised by the powerful of this world (imârat al-
jabâbira). Since this kingship did not belong to him, how
could it have been the lot of anyone who succeeded him?
Therefore, if the prophet has a successor, it is necessary that
this succession consists in the religious succession (khilâfat
dînîya), guaranteeing to the faithful the best conditions of the
viaticum and the Return, and that this spiritual kingship
(salatanat ma'nawîya) falls to the one who is of constant
devotion, the one who can be read as the very soul of the
Prophet, as the Prophet declared with regard to 'Alî, al-Hasan
and al-Hosayn1. » This statement is perfectly explicit; it best

1 This text appears in the great commentary of Qâzî Sa'îd Qommî on the

3
expresses the strictly religious conception of spiritual Islam
among the Shi'îte commentators, those from whom we have to
learn.
These essential features of imâmat as « spiritual royalty »
and as essentially « invisible » in the present state of the
world, only follow from the notion of walâyat, which
necessarily reappears as a leitmotif throughout the present
pages. Let us now specify another implication, this one
preparing us to hear one of our two paradoxes. The word
mahabbat (love) is often used in the texts as a doublet with the
word walâyat, or as a substitute for it, to designate the
dilection, the love, of which the person of the holy Imâms is
the object of their followers. More precisely, it is said that the
acceptance of this walâyat is as inseparable from the
recognition of the mission of the Prophet (nobowwat) as the
acceptance of the latter is from the tawhîd, the Attestation of
the One. The attestation, the shahâdat, is in fact a triple
attestation, without which a moslim (someone who professes
Islam) is not a true believer (a mu'min) 2. Now, in the practice
Kitâb al-Tawhîd of Ibn Bâbûyeh (381/991) chap. II, 3rd hadîth, 3rd matlab,
fol. 136b (ms. pers). A follower had come to speak with the tenth Imâm 'Alî
Naqî, whom the Abbasid police were holding prisoner in the camp of
Samarra. The long text forms a complete symbol of the Shi'ite Imâmite faith.
Qâzi Sa'îd repeatedly returns to the theme of Imâmat as purely spiritual
kingship. This is important to note, because poor philosophies of history too
often tend to « explain » the retreat into the spiritual realm and
eschatological hopes as compensation for political frustrations. In addition to
the fact that this kind of explanation totally misunderstands what it is about,
it should be noted that Qazi Sa'îd was writing in the middle of the Safavid
period when there could be no question, for Shi'ism, of frustration of a
political nature. But just as in the hadîth it is always religious themes that
t-he Imâms discuss with their disciples, so our thinkers have always known
that the meaning of the Imâmat transcends all political reality of this world,
because its « dimension » is essentially eschatological.
2 The triple shahâdat or Attestation of faith which, from a simple moslim,
makes a mu'min or shî'ite faithful includes: the attestation of the One
(tawhîd), the attestation of the prophetic mission (nobowwat) and the
attestation of the walâyat of the Imâms; cf. among others Tafsîr Mir'ât al-
anwâr, Moqaddamat I, Maqâlat II, pp. 23-88

4
of walâyat towards the « Holy Family », Shi'ite Islam shows
itself as a religion of love, very different from this legalistic
spirit which passes for being in general that of Islam, and to
which the general attitude of Sunni Islam undoubtedly
corresponds. But our Shi'ite doctors, relying on their most
explicit hadîth, teach that without this intention and service of
love that the term walâyat connotes, no good work produced
by men could meet the divine approval. In this respect,
Shi'ism, which has been presented so often as the antithesis of
Sufism, is in fact ahead of Sufism on the path that
characterizes it. But at the same time a serious question arises:
if it is true that many fervent Shi'isms have shown reticence
towards Sufism, what about the relationship between Shi'ism
and Sufism in the beginning?
One of the most serious questions that Sufism faced (cf.
infra book III, the case of Rûzbehân) was to know if, yes or
no, love (the feeling and the word) can intervene in the
relations between man and his God. There were very different
answers on this point. But let us note this: if Shi'ism maintains,
through its apophatic theology, the absolute transcendence of
tawhîd3, it is precisely thanks to its imâmology that it
preserves tawhîd from the double trap of metaphysical
idolatry, namely agnosticism and naive anthropomorphism. He
avoids this double trap, by recognizing in the pre-eternal
theophanic person of the Imâms, the support of the divine
Names and Attributes. By contemplating in the theophanic
reality of the Imâm the revealed divine « Face » (this theme of
3 [There is a necessary interconnection between the negative or apophatic
theology (tanzîh) of Shî'ism and its imâmology positing the « epiphanic
function » of the Imâms (mazharîya) as manifesting not the divine
Essence (the dhât) but the divine operation or « energy » (the fi'l). Cf.
our communication on Imâmologie et philosophie (Colloque de
Strasbourg 1968, supra p. 65, n. 46). The negative theology is exposed
with all its rigor in a long khotba (preaching) pronounced in Merv by the
VIIIth Imâm Alî Rezâ, and inserted in the Kitâb al-Tawhîd of Ibn
Bâbûyeh, chapter II, 2nd hadîth. The commentary of Qâzî Sa'îd Qommî
on this text is fundamental.

5
the « Face » already indicated above, chap. I, 3, and to which
we shall return again), Shî'ism from the beginning, even
before Sufism had confronted the problem, discovered in the
human creature the meaning of the love that intervenes
between him and his God.
This is what the walâyat is about, the « esoteric of the
prophetic message », the idea of the Imâm as a guide to the
inner world (bâtin). And when we say inner world, we are not
talking about the contrast that we usually mark by using the
words « objective » and « subjective ». Perhaps it is difficult to
make this clear nowadays, when a certain agnosticism that still
claims to be Christian has nothing but contempt for what it
calls « interior and subjective religiosity », because their
« involvement » in the affairs of this world has not given these
pious agnostics time to understand what it is all about. In
contrast, for all our esotericists, the inner world refers to the
spiritual reality of supra-sensible universes which, as a
spiritual reality, is the one that encircles and envelops the
reality of the outer world. A Shi'ite thinker like Qâzî Sa'îd
Qommî insists particularly on this paradox: in the circles of
spiritual universes, unlike in the material circles, it is the
center which « surrounds » the periphery. To « come out » of
what we commonly call the external world is not a
« subjective » experience, but as « objective » as possible,
even if it is difficult to convey the evidence of it to a mind that
wants to be « modern ».
That said, Shi'ism, in the course of its history, has not
always been allowed to affirm purely and simply what makes
up its essence, as we have just indicated allusively. We said
above that it had to face a test and a paradox similar to what
Ismailism faced during the Fatimid period. Notwithstanding
the analogy, the few features already revealed, and on which
we will insist later, warn us that this ordeal must have had a
different character, if only because of the concept of the Imâm
and the Imâmat, which is dominated, in Twelver Shî'ism, by

6
the figure of the XXIst Imâm and by the idea of his necessary
occultation (ghaybat). But it remains that after having been
forced, during a long period, to a more or less rigorous
clandestinity, Shi'ism could finally, under the Iranian
sovereignty once restored by the Safavids, live in broad
daylight. In such circumstances, the temptation to settle in this
world is great, and the more one settles in this world, the less
one is inclined to emphasize the questions that hold the
attention of mystical theosophists. Perhaps this is the main
reason for the paradoxical invasion of Shi'ism by fiqh, legal
science, to the detriment of all that is 'irfân and hikmat ilâhîya,
gnosis and mystical theosophy, taught by the Imâms
themselves; this, even though the tradition of the hokamâ and
the 'orafâ has never been interrupted and represents something
unique in Islam until today. We shall return later to this
essential aspect of the « spiritual combat of Shi'ism ».
Hence it would seem, at first sight, that the situation is quite
simple. On the one hand, there are the spiritualists who,
faithful to the essence of Shi'ism, profess the entirety of Islam,
that is, its exoteric and esoteric aspects; in a general way, all
those who are designated as 'orafâ, hokamâ, mystics and
philosopher-theosophists (we shall see, below, in Book II, how
Sohrawardî already established a hierarchy of degrees among
them). And then, on the other hand, there would be those who,
for one reason or another, fearing all that passes for
« philosophy » in their eyes, stick to fiqh, to canon law, as if it
were the Islamic science par excellence, not to say exclusive.
They are the foqahâ, the doctors of the Law, those in whom
their co-religionists have more than once denounced the
paradox of Shi'ite doctors dropping the essential part of the
teaching of their Imâms.
In fact the situation is even more complex than this
dichotomy would suggest. And this complexity is largely due
to the ambiguity of the original relationship between Shi'ism
and Sufism, one of the reasons for which we suggested a few

7
lines ago. In Sunni Islam the situation is simple: Sufism and
the Sufis have over the centuries attested and represented, in
the face of the Doctors of the Law, the audacity of the inner
religion and the paradoxes of the religion of love. In Shi'ite
Islam it is not at all so simple, because from the beginning, the
notion of walâyat dominates the whole Shi'ite doctrine. By the
same token, the doctrine contains all the elements of the
religion of love addressed to the Theophanic Figure, to the
revealed Face of the transcendent and unknowable God in
itself, to the Person who « answers for » this inaccessible God.
As a pole of orientation of the metaphysical universes which it
reveals to him; as a mystical pole, the invisible Imâm groups
around him the whole of a spiritual hierarchy enveloped in the
eyes of this world in the same incognito. All these elements
are certainly found in Sufism and in the metaphysics of Sufism
to the point of giving the impression, when it comes to Sunni
Sufism, of a Shi'ism that no longer dares to speak its name.
But for all that, precisely, the Shi'ism, on the condition that he
lives the entirety of his Shi'ism, does not need Sufism as such,
because his Shi'ism is already the « tariqat » (mystical way) as
we indicated above (chap. I, 3, pp. 18 ff). In other words: the
notion of Sufism (tasawwof) does not cover the totality of the
mystical life in Islam. And it is this very fact that made us ask
the question above: what is the relationship between Shi'ism
and Sufism in the beginning? that is to say, what is the
relationship between spiritual Islam in the beginning?
To ask this question clearly is at least to avoid
misunderstanding. It is not the existence of Shi'ite Sufism that
provides, as such, the answer. Nor is it enough that a Shi'ite
theologian expresses reticence and sometimes more, with
regard to Sufism, to have to be classified among the doctors of
the Law, the antimystics. Far from it. Many spiritual Shi'is
speak exactly the language of the Sufis, and yet are not Sufis;
they do not belong to any tarîqat. Mollâ Sadrâ Shîrâzî, one of
the greatest names among the mystical theosophists of Iran,

8
was even led to write a book against the Sufis of his time,
while he himself was reproached for his Sufism by some of his
colleagues. Sufism itself is very diverse. There is a whole
Sufism which has developed an admirable metaphysics,
verified by its spiritual experience; but there is also a Sufism
which has disregarded all metaphysical knowledge. There is a
Sufism in which Imâm devotion is preponderant, but there is
also a Sufism in which the person of the shaykh tends to
replace purely and simply the transcendent person of the
Imâms.
Finally, one can say that there is a double paradox: there is
the paradox of the Doctors of the Law, oblivious to the entirety
of Shi'ism and its esoteric background; the paradox has
become worse since the Safavid period, but the symptoms are
manifest beforehand, just as the blossoming of the schools of
thought of the Safavid period was prepared by the preceding
generations. And there is the paradox of a certain Sufism that
forgets its origins. It is this double paradox which put so many
Shi'ite spirituals in the necessity of facing a « double front ».
This was the case of Sadrâ Shîrâzî and of many others, up to
the shaykhie school. Earlier, it was typically the case of
Haydar Amoli (8th/14th century) who, in his monumental
work, summarized at best, with a penetrating lucidity, the
situation experienced by Shi'ite spirituals (cf. Book IV below).
This is why the following pages will frequently refer to his
work.
The complexity of this situation cannot be discovered at
first sight; it requires many years spent not only in the
frequentation of texts, but also in that of beings. What is at
stake is a fundamental conception of man's destiny, our very
knowledge of Islam. It is striking that what appears as
constitutive of Shi'ite spirituality, and that we have just
indicated very quickly, have so far gone unnoticed by
Westerners as well as by most Sunni Muslims.
So we will ask Haydar Amoli in the following chapters how

9
he meditates on the Shi'i texts concerning the human situation
typified in the case of Adam. In the light of this situation,
certain conversations of the first Imâm 'Alî ibn Abî-Tâlib with
his chosen disciple, Komayl ibn Ziyâd, take on a relief where
the whole destiny of Shî'ism is already prefigured [...]. In other
words, a Haydar Amoli, like a Molla Sadra Shîrâzî, and later
the masters of the Shaykh school, situate for us the positions
of what is still at stake today in what we have called the
« spiritual combat of Shi'ism. »

Chapter III
The Spiritual Combat of Shi'ism

I - Situation of the Shi'ite spirituals

As if it were a sign of contradiction for this world, the

Shi'ism of the Twelve Imams was the object of atrocious
hatreds which rarely disarmed. They manifested themselves
against the person of the First Imâm as well as in the tragic
fate of his eleven descendants. But the Imâms themselves
warned their followers that their cause was a difficult one, and
that to sustain it they needed « hearts tested for faith » . As an
eminent shaykh said to me, « Never forget that there were only
a handful « of followers around our Imâms, and that it will be
so until the end of time. » Because Shi'ism assumes before the
world, essentially and integrally, the spiritual reality of the
prophetic message of Islam, it could not make a pact with the
ambitions and designs of this world. We do not have to make
here a political history, but only to indicate why during the
centuries (let us say since the entry of the Seljuk Turks in
Baghdad, in 1055, putting an end to the influence of the
Persian Shi'ite dynasty of the Bûyides), so many Shi'ite traces
are lost, because in fact the Shi'ites observe, in the
clandestinity, a rigorous « discipline of the arcane ». Thus, one
sometimes hesitates about the Shi'ite belonging of an author,

10
while reading between the lines the confession that he cannot
make explicitly.
A Persian treatise from the seventh and thirteenth centuries
(the name of the author remains uncertain) expresses his
indignation in this way: « If anyone asks,« writes our author,
« why the science of the Sunni foqahâ is so widely spread in
the world, while the same is not true of the science of the holy
Imâms (Ahl-e Bayt-e Rasûl, the 'members of the house of the
Prophet'), the answer is that, when Moses was a Muslim, he
was a member of the House of the Prophet: The reason is that
when Mo'awîya (the first of the Omayyads) had seized power
over the Islamic community, he gave vent to his hatred against
the Emir of the believers (the First Imâm, 'Alî ibn Abî-Tâlib);
he wrote letters to all his prefects, ordering them to put to
death anyone who claimed to be a member of the religion of
'Alî. .. They even cursed 'Alî from the pulpits of the mosques...
The same hatred was directed against the descendants of the
Imâm, so that it was difficult for them to make their
knowledge known and to have pupils. It is said that Sofyan
Thawrî came to Imâm Ja'far al-Sâdiq (the sixth Imâm) and the
Imâm said to him: « O Sofyan, you are a man wanted by the
Abbasid police; the Sultan has his eye on you. The Sultan has
his eye on you. Go in haste, but it is not we who are driving
you out. And when Abû Hanîfa (the head of the Hanafi rite in
Sunnism) had to quote the Amir of the Believers during his
lessons, he was content to mention him in these terms: the
shaykh said this1... Things did not get any better when the rule
1 In his Jâmi' al-asrâr (published in La philosophie shî'ite, supra p. 56, n.
20) pp. 424-425, Haydar Âmolî recalls a pathetic scene that occurred
between the sixth Imâm Ja'far al-Sâdiq and Abû Hanîfa who had been his
pupil. We see there Abû Hanîfa inviting the Imâm to come to Kûfa to forbid
people to insult the memory of the Companions of the Prophet: « The Imâm:
They would not welcome what I will tell them. - A. H.: How could they not
accept it from you, who are the son of the Messenger of God? - The Imâm:
You are the first one to ignore me. You entered my house without my
permission. You sat down without my order. You speak without my advice. It
has come back to me that you speak by syllogism? - A.H.: Yes. - The Imâm:

11
of the Omayyads ended and the Abbasids came to power
(132/750). The Imâms had to remain confined to their homes,
observing taqîyeh (the « discretion » or « discipline of the
arcane »). No one could freely go and help them, collect a
riwâyat (transmission of a tradition) from them... On the other
hand, all facilities were given to the foqahâ hostile to the
Imâms. Their hatred and ignorance earned them all the honors;
each one had a province (wilâyat) where he could at his ease
propagate his science. All this is common knowledge. Let the
wise man think about it. If, in spite of all this, there is
something of the knowledge of the Imâms spread everywhere
today, it is a proof that God is the guarantor of the religion of
His Messenger, of the group of our Imâms and of their
knowledge2! »
This gloomy picture suggests in short what the Shi'is had to
endure from the « orthodoxy » of power. The last Imâms
(tenth and eleventh Imâms) lived practically in captivity in the
camp of Samarra (some hundred kilometers north of
Baghdad), and left this world while they were still in their
youth. Yet they too had fearless disciples to whom they
transmitted their teachings (cf. the great encyclopedia of

Beware, O No'mân! The first one to make a syllogism was Iblis (Satan),
when he was ordered to bow down to Adam: « You have created me from
fire, » he said, « while he (Adam) was created from clay. » Then the Imâm
began to ask Abû Hanîfa a series of questions concerning fiqh and tafsîr. To
each answer, the Imâm retorts with a « Why then? » and the situation of Abû
Hanîfa becomes untenable). This is how this man (Abû Hanîfa) spoke with
the Pole of the Poles during his life, » Haydar Âmolî continues with a
beautiful violence : « And this is the one that the 'ârif (Dâwûd Qaysarî) puts
among the Awliyâ insignia! I testify by God! This is an enormous imposture.
In truth, the aversion to the Shi'is and to some other Sufis is due to nonsense
of this kind. If I were not afraid of going on, I would explain some of their
sources (osûl) and their derivations (forû') which would allow one to judge
their position. But it is better to remain silent. »
2 Mo'taqâd al-Imâmîya (the faith professed by the Imamite Shî'is), a
Persian treatise (no author's name) from the seventh / thirteenth century, on
the Shî'ite Kalâm (tawhîd, prophethood, imâmat) and fiqh (law), ed. M.
Meshkât and M.-T. Dânesh-Pajûh, Tehran 1339/1961, pp. 138-141

12
Majlisî mentioned above). Thus, the final reflection of our
anonymous 13th century author attests to this desperatio
fiducatius (confident despair) which is at the bottom of the
Shi'ite ethos. He writes himself in a century where appear, in
full Mongolian torment, the great figures of the philosopher-
theologian shî'ite Nasîroddîn Tûsî and of a master of the shî'ite
Sufism like Sa'oddîn Hamûeyh. In the following century, the
work of Haydar Âmolî and that of Rajab Borsî will appear;
later still, in the century preceding the advent of the Safavids,
the work of Ibn Abî Jomhûr to which we have already
referred. All this would prove, if it were necessary, that here
again « the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the believers ».
That is why when we speak of the « spiritual combat of
Shi'ism », it is not so much a question of this open struggle,
where each one easily recognizes his own. It is about
something more subtle, a fight against an inner threat and
against a more difficult to recognize peril, because this threat
and this peril, as we have just indicated in the previous pages,
are formed at the very moment when the external appearances
are those of success.
Judging things on the surface, one would not expect a
danger to arise from a success as brilliant as the advent of the
Safavids in Iran. Undoubtedly this danger did not arise with
Shâh Esmâ'il, himself a Sufi, surrounded by Sufi companions,
and who, as a young hero of fifteen years, had the audacity, in
the great mosque of Tabrîz where he had just entered
victoriously, to celebrate the prayer in the name of the holy
Imâms in spite of the hostility of a Sunni population3. There
3 See the text quoted by Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia,
vol. IV, Cambridge 1930, pp. 53. Certain cruel behaviors are not without
casting their shadow on the person of Shâh Esma'il: there is no need to insist
on them here. There is, on the other hand, reason to suggest that a
phenomenological comparison between the significance of the advent of
Shâh Esma'il (Shâh Isma'il, crowned in 905/1499, at the age of fourteen) as
experienced on the one hand in Iran, and on the other hand in the course of
time, would be very instructive, by and for the Iranian national conscience
and the religious cosncience shî'ite, and such as through the accounts of the

13
were then many links between the Safavid family and the
Ni'matollah family, descended from Shâh Ni'matollah Walî
Kermânî, one of the greatest masters of Shî'ite Sufism (ob.
834/1431) of the previous period4. But things changed
profoundly with the reign of Shâh 'Abbâs the Great (1587-
1628). It is not the history of this reign that concerns us here,
but the situation of the spirituals, and on this situation the
personal confidences of Mollâ Sadrâ Shîrazî in his books, as
well as the intention that dictated several of his books, edify us
sufficiently (cf. infra Book V).
The Safavid renaissance was marked by a boom unique in
the world of Islam, by the emergence of several schools of
thinkers whose influence is still felt today, and whose leaders
were Mîr Dâmâd, Sadrâ Shîrâzî, Mohsen Fayz, Rajab 'Alî
Tabrîzî and many others, with their pupils and the pupils of
their pupils. This is not to say, however, that their situation
was absolutely comfortable. If Mollâ Sadrâ had to live for
about ten years in retirement, in a hidden village in the secrecy
of a valley not far from Qomm, he himself tells us the reason:
the hostility of the foqahâ, their attitude closed to everything
called hikmat and 'irfân. One is then the witness of this
paradox that we tried to situate, a few pages ago: the Shi'ite
gnosis which had victoriously crossed several centuries of
persecution and clandestinity, found itself, with the temporal
success of Shi'ism, in front of a new kind of test to be faced.
Things followed the course that one should expect from the
human condition. Alongside the unique rise of the thought of
the hokamâ, we see the formation and growing influence of a

travelers it appeared on the other hand at the time in Occident, like advent of
a « new prophet », the « new Sufi » having to bring the end of Islam and the
Turkish power; cf. for example André Chastel, Leonardo da Vinci par lui-
même, Paris 1952, p. 164
4 Cf. Jean Aubin, Matériaux pour la biographie de Shâh Ni'matollaâh Wali
Kermânî (Bibl. Iranienne, vol. 7), Teheran-Paris, 1956. The edition of Shâh
Ni'matollâh's works was undertaken by Mr. Javâd Nûbakhsh Kermânî (6 vol.
published in 1968).

14
legalistic orthodoxy, more and more exclusively devoted to
practical questions of canon law, jurisprudence, and casuistry,
distrustful of all that is philosophy, theosophy, mysticism. It is
difficult to speak of clericalism where there is no Church; but
the foqahâ and the akhûnd have sometimes made up for this
absence so well that the consequences have been felt to this
day.
It is not only the pages of Mollâ Sadrâ which inform us of
this: the misunderstanding which the shaykhie school later
encountered is another example (cf. infra Book VI). I can say
that even today in Iran, this preponderance of fiqh and foqahâ
is a subject of frequent and discreet conversations between
hokamâ and 'orafâ. How did this come about? How did the
fiqh, the canon law, become so invasive? Certainly, fiqh is part
of the training of every theologian-philosopher, but the painful
situation has its origin in those foqahâ who claim to limit all
theological science to fiqh. They thus mutilate the very
teaching of the holy Imâms, and forbid Shî'ism to make its
spiritual message known. However, the perpetuation and
transmission of the spiritual message of the Imams are
independent of the question of whether a particular Islamic
society will reject or accept the introduction of the civil code
in order to « adapt to the modern world ». Therefore, limiting
Islamic science to fiqh condemns us to dead-end situations.
This is undoubtedly a well-known socio-religious
phenomenon. The refusal of all that is « gnosis » is inspired by
a dogmatic rationalism under which a conscious or
unconscious agnosticism is hidden, and it is this refusal which
gives rise to the situation characterized previously here as a
situation where Shi'ism must somehow hide from itself, that is
to say, where Shi'ism gnosis, in order to preserve its
completeness, must somehow hide from official Shi'ism.
However, the consciousness that Shi'ism had of itself from the
beginning was the consciousness of being the esoteric of the
prophetic message (bâtin al-nobowwat), and it was, according

15
to the pathetic formula of Imâm Ja'far, the religion of the
« expatriates » (ghorabâ) from among the community of
Mohammad. The fact that the temporal triumph has given rise
to something like an official Shi'ism, expatriating the Imâm's
expatriates, is what gives meaning to the « spiritual struggle of
Shi'ism ». It is up to the Shi'ism to win in this fight [...]. For
the « triumphal » period has already passed, and only those
who will understand the Imâm's call will be able to face the
dizzying problems raised in Shi'ism Islam, as elsewhere, by
the impact of the West. And after all, this situation is not only
that of traditional Islam in front of the so-called modern world:
it is that, in front of this same world, of the whole fraction of
humanity still capable of sensing the spiritual and supernatural
destiny of man.
Iranian Islam has never lacked knights to lead this fight,
from generation to generation, until our days. We said earlier
that the Shi'ite spirituals had to face a « double front ». The
work of Haydar Âmoli shows us that one of these fronts was
itself a double front, because of the equivocation weighing on
Sufism, according to whether one considers it as a witness of
the shî'ism in partibus sunnitarum, or as a defector forgetting
its origins. To understand this, let us insist once again on this
type of Shi'ite spirituals who speak a technical language not
different from that of the Sufis, and who profess a theosophy
where many non-Shi'ite Sufis can easily find their way. They
too have dreams, visionary experiences. And yet, they do not
belong to Sufism.
This is precisely the situation which, on the one hand, led
Mollâ Sadrâ to take a stand against the ignorant foqahâ, and
which, on the other hand, led him to write a treatise against
certain Sufis of his time [5], whose pious agnosticism
professed contempt for books, and whose pious agnosticism
professed contempt for books, rejection of philosophical
meditation as a spiritual exercise, and which finally led to a
spiritual libertinism that was the opposite of the attitude of the

16
foqahâ, in the sense that this libertinism professed a bâtin
without zâhir. The reasons for which mystical theosophists like
the masters of the shaykhie school criticize Sufism, in their
turn, aim above all, besides a doctrine misunderstanding the
meaning of the univocity of being (wahdat al-wojûd), at the
organization and the congregational practices of Sufism
(tarîqat), Shî'ism being already, as such in its integral essence,
the « tarîqat » par excellence; the criticism is aimed at the
role assumed by the person of the shaykh in Sufism (one
thinks of the guru in India), because it appears to the Imâmite
spiritualist that this role usurps that of the only spiritual master
that the Shî'ite follower must recognize and follow, namely the
personal guide « invisible to the senses but present in the
heart » , who is the Hidden Imâm. The general conviction of
these masters is the one already stated by Haydar Âmolî, and it
is that in its distant origin Sufism was born in Islam through
Shi'ism, but that by separating itself from the Imâms of
Shi'ism, Sufism has become distorted.
It is as if Sunni Sufism had transferred the content of
Imâmology to the person of the Prophet alone, eliminating
everything that did not agree with Sunni sentiment. The Sufi
idea of the mystical pole, the Qotb, is none other than that of
the Imâm; in Shi'ism Sufism, the Imâm remains the pole of the
poles as the Seal of the Walâyat, whereas in Sunni Sufism the
idea of the Qotb merely replaces that of the Imâm professed by
Shi'ism. From the time when the great works of Ismaili
theosophy (3rd-4th/9th-10th centuries) were born, we see
something of this in Sufism. Moreover, why did some Sufis
professing Sunnism want to give themselves as bearers of a
message from the hidden Imâm? Let us think of the case of
Hallâj, who remains inseparable, because we borrow the
technical language. It would seem that it was to discredit the
latter that one sought to dissociate him from it. And yet, the
more one dissociates it from them, the more one justifies the
shî'ite judgment on its case.

17
 On the other hand, it should be remembered that Jâbir ibn
Hayyân, the famous alchemist, disciple of Imâm Ja'far Sâdiq,
according to a constant tradition that nothing can decisively
invalidate, was nicknamed the Sufi from the beginning. The
alchemy of Ja'far is inseparable from his Shi'ite conceptions:
the Imâm is for the spiritual world what the Stone or the Elixir
are for the world of Nature. And so it is that one of the most
abstruse works of Jâbir provides us with perhaps the first
elaboration of the authentically gnostic motif of the Stranger,
the allogenous, the spiritual exptriate (gharîb) coming from
distant shores. Now the archetype of the Stranger remains in
Shi'ite gnosis the person of Salman the Persian (Salman Pârsî)
or Salman the Pure (Salman Pâk): a pilgrim in search of the
True Prophet, belonging by birth to the Mazdean knighthood,
passing through Christianity, finally marked with the seal of
pure spiritual Islam by becoming, as a lonely orphan, the
adopted of the Imâm. And the case of Salman is the case of all
those to whom the famous sentence of Imâm Ja'far refers, to
be quoted here again because it has the virtue of a motto:
« Islam began as an expatriate and will become an expatriate
again as it was in the beginning. Blessed are those among
them, the community of Mohammad, who expatriate
themselves (the ghorabâ)5. »
This call of Imâm Ja'far, as we already know, is one that
decisively denies any identification of the « religious » and
the « social », for it is not to a « social religion » that the
Imâm's call calls. By proclaiming the « spiritual expatriate »
blessed, the Imâm calls him to renounce all compromise with
the values and orders established in this world, in order to
make this very world the field of his « queste » for another
world, the field of his migration towards what is already
invisibly present in this world, the world of the palingenesis
and the Resurrection of which the Imâm is the herald. To use a

5 Cf. our study on the « Book of the Glorious » by Jâbir ibn Hayyân
(Eranos-Jahrbuch XVIII), Zürich 1950, pp. 104

18
fashionable language today, let us say that such is the only
« presence in the world », the only « engagement » in this
world, for the spiritual pilgrim as witness of the absolute. […]
On the other hand, Imâm Ja'far's sentence has the meaning
of a personal eschatology lived now « in the present », because
the spiritual expatriation consented to in order to join the way
of the Imâm, marks a rupture. And this rupture puts an end to
the captivity that keeps man sheltered from the social ramparts
erected to guarantee the individual against an immediate
spiritual experience; by this rupture, suddenly this ghorbat,
this exile that Sohrawardî will typify in a striking account
(infra book II) is revealed to the conscience. This sentence of
the Imâm calls his faithful to walâyat, calls him to devote his
love to the pure theophanic figures whose light, by tearing him
away from the solitude of his exile, reveals to him all the lies
accumulated to disguise the reality of this exile and to lead
him to a compromise with this world. Here, Haydar Âmoli's
work remains perfectly relevant for Shi'ite spirituality, in the
sense that it awakens its follower to the awareness of a triple
spiritual combat, in other words, to the combat on a « triple
front » that the spiritual person must support in order to
respond to the Imâm's call and to safeguard the integrity of his
Shi'ism.
Of these « three fronts », we already know two of them
from what has been said above. There is a fight against
Sunnism as the pure religion of the Sharî'at, that of the doctors
of the Law who refuse the vivification of this Law by its
spiritual truth, its gnosis. The positions are clear: they are even
clearer, if under the pretext of modernizing the Sharî'at, one
makes of the « religious law » the « social religion ». And then
there is a second battle, more painful and pathetic than the
first, since it must be fought, and we have recalled why, within
Shi'ism, where the 'orafâ and the hokamâ, faithful to the
integral teaching of the holy Imâms, find before them those of
the doctors of the Law, the foqahâ, who outwardly profess

19
Shi'ism but who in fact have forgotten the very vocation of
Shi'ism, forgotten its esoteric teaching which is the deepening
and transfiguration of the Prophetic Revelation by the Imâms.
Finally, there is an even more subtle struggle against a certain
Sufism that forgets its own origins, a Sufism that, by denying
Shi'ism, by forgetting the origins and the source of the
walâyat, is mistaken as to the one who is its « Seal » and that,
by exaggerating the practice of certain techniques to the
detriment of what is 'irfân, gnosis, can degenerate into a pious
obscurantism, no longer responding to the problems and
expectations of men.
As we shall see again (infra book IV), the whole of Haydar
Âmoli's great book responds to this purpose: to bring the
foqahâ to recognize the necessity of mystical gnosis ('irfân),
and to rally those Sufis who are in a way the lost witnesses of
Shî'ism within Sunnism. The original relationship between
Sufism and Shi'ism will then be re-established. On this
condition depends, for Haydar Âmolî, that spiritual Islam
survives or perishes. It was there to foresee perfectly from the
XIVth century the problems that the evolution of Shi'ism in
Iran was going to pose with a growing acuteness until our
days. And the terms in which they were posed remain current
in the eyes of whoever understands that the stake of the triple
combat is none other than the divine deposit entrusted to the
man.

II – The Divine deposit entrusted to Man

What is at issue is whether or not, in the absence of what the

word bâtin connotes (the inner, the hidden, the esoteric, the
« mystical »), Islamic doctrine as a whole is deprived of the
constitutive element that finally gives it its meaning; if the
teaching of the Imâms of shî'ism constitutes precisely this
esotericism of Islam, as an integral part of the « phenomenon
of the Holy Book », because they themselves constitute the

20
esoteric of the mohammedian Logos or eternal prophetic
Reality (Haqîqat mohammadiya) and that, consequently, the
entire phenomenon of the Holy Book postulates, from the
beginning, zâhir and bâtin, exoteric and esoteric. Thus,
Haydar Âmoli is only behaving like the hokamâ and the 'orafâ
shî'ites who reject the gnosis of Sufism, because they forget
the shî'ite origin, and the Sufis who, because of the same
forgetfulness, revile shî'ism. Both of them pretend to ignore
that the teachings of the holy Imâms contain all the secrets of
the high sciences. Some of them have deliberately left out this
aspect, claiming that this teaching concerned only the exoteric
sciences, the ritual of the Law, the jurisprudence: some have
even insinuated that, if the Imâms had a secret, they did not
transmit it to anyone. Those of the Shi'ite foqahâ who have
behaved in this way have done so to deny the very existence of
esotericism. As for those Sufis who did so, it was to deny their
origin, simply forgetting that without Shi'ism and the Imâms,
their own theosophy would not exist (cf. text quoted below
book IV, i).
The Imâms were not simply interpreters of the sharî'at, or
rather it should be said that they were interpreting the mystical
way (tarîqat) and the masters of high theological knowledge
(haqîqat). Shaykh Ahmad Ahsâ'î and the shaykh school, from
the eighteenth century until today, did not support anything
else; their spiritual struggle was directed in the same direction
as that of Haydar Âmolî. That the Twelve Imams are
primordial theophanies; that in their spiritual entity pre-
existing their terrestrial manifestation (cf. already supra chap.
II), they are invested with a cosmogonic function, these are not
so many speculative theories built up late, but evidences stated
in the most ancient hadîth, those for example collected in the
Kitâb al-Hojjat of Kolayni. If the Christian hermeneutic of the
Bible cannot fail to put Christology at the center, the Shi'i
hermeneutic of the Qur'an is necessarily an « imâmocentric »
hermeneutic. This is because imâmology conceals in itself the

21
secret of God and man, which means the secret of the
instituted relationship between God and man, insofar as this
relationship could only be instituted by « men of light»
designated as prophets. The theophany of the Twelve Imams,
or rather that of the Fourteen Unsullied, is accomplished as a
descent from universe to universe in a gradual succession
analogous to the succession of the theophanic metamorphoses
of the Logos in the book of the « Acts of John 1». The integral
hermeneutic of the revealed book embraces these different
ontological states, in the order of their descent to the world of
earthly man (cf. infra chap. V).
There are also many sayings traditionally attributed to the
Prophet and the Imams which explain the allusions of the
Qur'anic verses, in order to attest that Islam and the Qur'anic
Revelation imply and postulate an esoteric teaching, a hidden
higher truth. In addition, it would be necessary to mention here
the whole collection of preaches (khtobat) attributed to this or
that Imâm, but in which an eternal Imâm is expressed, of
which each of the twelve Imâms was an exemplification on
earth, since they are all one and the same essence. Among all
these preaches, the famous « Preachment of the Declaration »
(khotbat al-Bayan)2 stands out, in which the identity of the
1 Like the mystery of the « Cross of Light » , Acts of John, chap. 98 ff.
Idea of the metamorphoses of the Logos, already formulated in Philo, and
which returns frequently in the writings of Origen, showing the Savior as a
man for men, an Angel for Angels, cf. Joseph Barbel, Christos Angelos
(Theophaneia, 3), Bonn 1941, p. 292, n°457, 465, 469. This is still the idea
formulated in a gnostic text like the Gospel according to Philip (ed. and
translation by Jacques E. Ménard, Paris 1967) sentence 26 Cf. our study
Divine epiphany and spiritual birth in the Ismaili gnosis (Eranos-Jahrbuch,
XXXIII), 1955, chapter I, « Metamorphoses of theophanic visions ».
2 Even if this preaching was not actually pronounced by the first Imâm in
Kûfa, it was pronounced at a given moment, by an eternal Imâm, in the
Shî'ite consciousness, and it is this that is phenomenologically important. In
fact, this statement recapitulates many statements scattered in the hadiths
held to be the most authentic and a thinker as demanding as Qâzî Sa'îd
Qommî held for the authenticity of this statement that he himself
commented. It seems to be identical with the Khotbat al-iftikhar (Dhari'at,

22
Imâm with the Perfect Man (Anthropos teleios) is affirmed, a
theme by which Shi'i Imâmology attests its link with the
theological motif of the celestial Anthropos, familiar to all the
gnoses that preceded it3. Seventy affirmations follow one
another, the repeated hammering of which, it is said, finally
put the audience into a trance in Kûfa, where the first Imâm
had pronounced this sermon. Let us note here some of them:
« I am the Sign of the Most Powerful. I am the First and the
Last. I am the Manifest and the Hidden. I am the Face of God.
I am the Hand of God. I am the side of God. I am He who in
the Gospel is called Elijah. I am the One who holds the secret
of the Envoy of God... »
The statement of this theophanic secret spontaneously leads
our shi'ite authors, such as Haydar Âmolî, to detect in the
Koranic verses the commandment which imposes the
« discretion », the « discipline of the arcane » , taqîyeh or
ketmân. Let us note that the attitude designated by one or the
other word is not what we call « mental restriction ». It is a
safeguard clause, certainly, and quite understandable in the
case of the Shi'ites. But, above all, it satisfies a principle of
rigorous spiritual honesty. If this honesty is prescribed by the
Qur'an, it is because there are exoteric and esoteric elements,
and the veiled form in which it is discovered corresponds all
the better to its nature. Now, this is the esoteric meaning of the
verses referring to the entrusted deposit that should be returned
only to the one who is entitled to hold it, and par excellence,
the following verses: « Die orders you to return to those to
vol. III, no. 984), which is already mentioned by Ibn Shahr-Ashûb, and a
commentary on it by Hasan Sabbâh, the founder of Alamût (ob. 518/1124,
cf. Kalâmi Pir, ed. W. Ivanow, pp. 79-81 of the Persian text). The Khotbat al-
Bayân is one of a number of proclamations in which Shi'i gnosis is most
vigorously asserted: the Khotbat al-tatanjiya (« The proclamation between
the two gulfs », tatanj = khalij) has been admirably commented on by
Sayyed Kâzem Reshtî. We will come back to it elsewhere.
3 Cf. Triologie Ismaélienne, index, s. v. To treat this theme of the
Anthropos in the Imamite gnosis as in the Ismaili gnosis would require a
whole book, for it dominates all their « adamology ».

23
whom they belong the entrusted deposits » (4:61). Haydar
Âmolî comments that all the secrets of God (asrâr Allâh), all
the theosophical secrets, are deposits that He has entrusted to
the hearts of His Friends (Awliyâ). To hand them over to
someone who is not entitled to them, because they exceed his
capacity, is to incur both the rigors of the Law and the divine
wrath. This is why the Imâms themselves prescribed the
observance of taqîyeh to their followers.
In fact, such a conception of the nature of the « entrusted
deposit », foreseeing, with its consequences, the possibility of
transgressing the order to transmit only to the one who is the
« heir » - expresses in such a profound way the secret of
theosophy and the secret of the Holy Book, that it unveils the
very origin of the drmae typified in the person of Adam, the
terrestrial Adam, the Adam-man. There is a Qur'anic verse
whose gravity is such that the very existence and raison d'être
of what is called esotericism depend on it, because this verse
links the mystery of God and the mystery of man as being one
and the same mystery. This is the verse where God Himself
declared: « We offered the deposit of our secrets to the
Heavens, to the Earth and to the mountains: all refused to take
it; all trembled to receive it. But man agreed to take it; he is
violent and ignorant » (Quran 33:72).
In order to understand this verse, two questions need to be
answered: what is the deposit, what secrets are involved?
Secondly, what is the violence and unawareness of man? The
two questions are inseparable from each other: what are the
secrets that man could not have accepted the deposit of, if he
were not violent and ignorant? How should this violence and
this ignorance lead him to betray this deposit? The ambiguity
of this violence foreshadows the drama from which the present
human condition originates, the secret of humanity's present
destiny. So it would be necessary to mobilize all the Shi'ite
traditions, all the hadîths of the Imâms, passing, more or less
closely, to the scope of this verse. It would take a whole book.

24
 In short, there is what the Imâms have repeated in the
hadîths: « This secret was our walâyat. » Now, I is itself the
member of a triad constituted by a triple acquiescence: to the
Unity of the One (tawhîd), to the exoteric mission of the
prophets (nobowwat), to the esoteric mission of the Friends of
God (walâyat). The weight of this triple attestation (shahâdat)
is the weight of man. But the very idea of this triple shahâdat,
what the second and third sentences aim at, postulates the
existence of an all-light humanity, a « celestial »
superhumanity, pre-existing the Adamic humanity, the earthly
Adam. This is why the full meaning of the Qur'anic verse is
only intelligible in relation to the whole cosmogony and
prophethology of the Shi'ite gnosis. And it is according to this
integral meaning that the violence and ignorance of Adam
show an ambiguity, a double face, one of which is to the praise
of Adam while the other was his loss, and by this duality is
established the agreement between the various Shi'ite allusions
to this verse. Let us try to explain the content of these rather
dense indications.
It is advisable to keep in mind the statement that the Prophet
and the Imâm respectively make about themselves: « I was
already a prophet (a nabî)... I was already a walî (an Imâm),
while Adam was still in water and clay », i.e. while Adam was
not yet formed. This means that before the Adamic humanity,
before the earthly Adam, and of an immeasurable anteriority to
the chronologies of what our human sciences call prehistory,
there is a seraphic humanity, a group of human creatures of
pure light, immaculate, preserved from all fall, « infallible » ,
unlike the Adamic humanity; it is the pleroma of the Fourteen
Immaculate (Shahârdeh Ma'sûm). Our texts, the commentaries
of Qâzî Sa'îd Qommî for example, designate them by
significant terms: supreme humanity, humanity of the heights
(al-bashar al-'awâlî), archangelic humanity (anâs 'aqliyun),
men of light (bashar nûrîyûn) etc. In their longing and ecstasy
of love (walayh wa hayamân), these beings of light surround

25
the sublime Throne, the invisible Temple which is the
archetype of the temples of all the universes4. It is to this
anteriority that many hadîth from the Prophet or the Imâms
allude; the idea dominates the whole cosmogony and
anthropology of the Shi'ite gnosis.
There is, among others, a very long interview of the fifth
Imâm, Imâm Mohammad al-Bâqir, with his disciple Jâbir al-
Jo'fî. We can only indicate here some of the main features of
this sumptuous hadîth5. The initial statement is the constant
affirmation that the Prophet and the Imâms were the first
created beings, when there was neither Heaven nor Earth,
neither night nor day, neither sun nor moon, neither Adam nor
earthly humanity. The Fourteen Unsullied proceeded as
Fourteen Lights (Fourteen « Aiôns » of light) which are, in
relation to the light of their Lord, like the rays of the sun in
relation to the sun. There is even here a reminiscence of the
visio smaragdina of the Apocalypse: the Fourteen Lights are
around the Ineffable Presence like so many green pavilions
(« And the Throne was surrounded by a rainbow like an
emerald » - Apocal. 4:3). From this pleroma of the Fourteen
Lights, the genesis of the worlds takes place in the following
succession: the Place of Places, the Cosmic Throne, the
Heavens and the Angels, the Air and the Genii, and finally the
Adam-man. At each of the acts of cosmogony, the triple
attestation (shahâdat), affirming the divine Singularity
(tawhîd), the prophetic mission (nobowwat) and the initiatory
mission (walâyat), reappears in one way or another, in
mysterious characters, because each of these acts of

4 Cf. Qâzî Sa'îd Qommî in his great commentary on the hadîth quoted
above p. 80, n. 54. The author has developed his commentary here into a
vast treatise on the esoteric meaning of the five great religious practices
(asrâr al-'ibâdât). We refer here to chapter IV of the Kitâb Asrâr al-Hajj
(Book of the Esoteric Meanings of the Pilgrimage), fol. 182 (ms. pers.)
5 This hadîth comes from the Riyâz al-Jannân of Fazlollâh Mahmûd Fârsî
(supra, p. 52, n. 23); it is confirmed by other hadîths of Sadûq Ibn Babûyeh
(infra, p. 100, n. 69).

26
cosmogony corresponds to a particular theophany of the
pleroma of the fourteen lights.
The acts of cosmogony and anthropogenesis are closed by a
solemn enthronement of the Fourteen Unsullied: « It is
because of you that I have created what I have created. You are
the elite placed between me and my creation. I have veiled
myself through you to my creatures other than you. I have
made you such that it is through you that one is in front of me,
and that it is through you that every request is addressed to me.
For everything will perish except My Face (cf. Qur'an 55:26-
27) and you are My Face. You shall not perish, nor shall
anyone who chooses you for friends perish6.
This solemn text is particularly typical of what is called
hadîth qodsî, an inspired narrative in which God speaks (as in
the Qur'ân itself) in the first person, and whose form finds its
explanation and justification in the whole of prophetic
gnoseology (infra chapter VI). From a text of this kind it
emerges that the fourteen Aiôns of light are the primordial
theophanic figures, the initial supports of the very idea of
Tehophany. For « creating the world » is for the abysmal God
to become known, and it is through these Figures alone that he
can be known, since, in whatever direction one turns, they are
the divine Face that one encounters. Man can only know God
by His Names and Attributes, and these Figures are the support
of these Names and Attributes. Hence the name Hojjat
(guarantor, proof) which is given to them par excellence: the
Fourteen Unsullied are those who « answer for » the God
whom no one can see or reach, and that is why they are the
imperishable Divine Face. We shall see later that this is the
secret of the « imâmocentrism » of Shi'ite spirituality (infra
chap. VIII).
This hadîth is confirmed by many others such as those
collected by Shaykh Sadûq Ibn Bâbûyeh7, where Prophet and

6 Quoted in Tafsîr Mir'at al-anwâr, pp. 28-29.

7 Hadîth collected in the Kitâb al-Mir'âj of Saduq Ibn Bâbuyeh, quoted

27
Imâm are described as two primordial Spirits forming one and
the same Light, a bi-unity expressing the double « dimension«
of Haqîqat mohammadîya. From this it follows that the
superhumanity of the mohammadian Logos or the
mohammadian Light (Nûr mohammadî) pre-exists the Adamic
humanity. The nature of this superhumanity becomes clearer
when God wants to create Adam the earthly, since the Creator
then « kneads » a portion of this Light with a portion of the
« clay » of 'Illîyûn (the highest degree of paradise), and this
substance of light is inserted into the substance of Adam. It is
thus the divine « dimension » (jihat haqqîya, the lâhût) which,
in the being of the prophets, doubles the human and creaturely
« dimension » (jihat khalqîya, the nâsût); by the first, the
prophets receive from God; by the second they communicate
to men. For this substance of light introduced in Adam will be
transmitted, from prophet to prophet, until the final period of
the cycle of prophecy: from 'Abdol-Mottalib, the common
grandfather of the Prophet Mohammad and Imâm 'Alî, this
substance of light splits into two halves, which are manifested
respectively in the person of the Prophet as « Seal of
Prophethood » and in the person of the Imâm as « Seal of
Walâyat »8.
Of course, the transmission of this Light is not a physiology
of the physical body. It is to be understood in the same way as
the physiology of the « subtle body » . It allusively indicates
the only idea of « incarnation » that Islamic prophetology
could recognize. Finally, it is the precise reminiscence in
Islamic theology of the theme of the « True Prophet »,
professed by primitive Christian prophetology, that of Judeo-
Christianity or Ebionism (the « True Prophet » hastening, from
prophet to prophet, to the place of his rest, this being, for
in Tafsîr Mir'at al-anwâr, p. 30.
8 Tafsîr, pp. 25 and 29; Qâzî Sa'îd Qommî, 136b; Haydar Âmolî, op. cit,
index of hadîth and index of technical terms s. v. nûr. It is recalled that
'Abdol-Mottalib was the father of 'Abdollah, father of the Prophet, and
of Abû-Tâlib, father of Imâm 'Alî.

28
Christianity, the person of Jesus, whereas in Islam it is the
person of Mohammad).
These elements having been put together, we can see what
the secret entrusted to the Adam-man is, and how the
unconsciousness which allows him to accept to take it on, also
leads him to betray it.
The holy Imâms have often repeated in their lessons that the
secret whose deposit is thus offered to the human creature is
their walâyat9, that is to say, this qualification which makes
them the « Friends of God » (Awlîyâ Allâh), the « guardians of
the divine cause » (al-amr al-ilâhî), invested with a mission
that doubles and completes the prophetic mission (nobowwat)
and whose purpose is to initiate those who « choose them as
friends and guides » to the hidden spiritual meaning, to the
esoteric meaning of the Divine Revelations given to the
prophets. To « take them for friends » is, on the part of their
followers, to dedicate their love to them (their walâyat or their
mahabbat, the two words frequently alternating), thus
dedicating this love to the Divine Face which in them shows
itself to mankind, and this is what, as we now know, Islam as a
prophetic religion is a religion of love, in the form of shî'ism.
Those who « take them for friends » are preserved from
perishing, for the divine Face is imperishable. That is why the
attestation of this walâyat, as a devotion of love, responding,
on the side of the faithful, to the divine dilection of which the
DOuze Imâms are the object, - this attestation (shahâdat) is the
final and indispensable completion of a triple Attestation:
Attestation of the One (the Super-being, the Ineffable, the
Unpredictable), Attestation of the prophetic mission which
reveals Him to mankind (as to His Names, His Attributes, His
Operations), attestation of the Imâmat by this walâyat,
devotion of love constitutive of faith itself (imân), which

9 Cf. the hadîth of the Imâms collected as a commentary on verse 33:72 in

Kitâb al-Borhân fî tafsîr al-Qorân by Hâshim b. Solayman al-Hosayn al-
Bahrânî (ob. 1107 or 1109 h.), Tehran 1375 (1956), vol. III, pp. 340 ff.

29
attests that the Imâm is the initiating guide to the hidden
meaning of these Names, these Attributes, these Operations.
That is why all the Shi'i doctors agree on this point: tawhîd,
the Attestation of the One, is in the same relation to the
Attestation of the prophetic mission as it is to the Attestation
of the One; in other words, walâyat is in the same relation to
nobowwat as it is to tawhi'id. The three phases of the
attestation form an inseparable whole. The testimony of the
faithful, of the walâyat of which they are the object on the part
of God, closes and seals the whole, to such an extent that
without walâyat, without this devotion of love that the term
connotes, not only is faith vain, but there is no faith (îmân) in
the full sense of the word10.
It is this triple shahâdat that has been mysteriously written,
from universe to universe, at each level of the theophanies,
because it concerns the Principle and the double movement of
which the Principle is both the point of origin and the point of
return: the movement of genesis that proceeds from it and the
movement of return that leads back to it, mabda' and ma'âd.
This pair of terms expresses in its cosmic aspect the same bi-
unity of which other examples express the religious aspect:
tanzîl and ta'wîl (descent of the Revelation and reconduction
of the revealed letter to its archetype by spiritual
hermeneutics), nobowwat (prophetic mission) and imâmat.
That is why, at each level of theophanies, the same triple
commitment (mithâq) has been asked from the beings that
populate the universe corresponding to this theophanic level,
until the descent of the theophanies reaches the earthly man11.
10 Cf. Tafsîr Mir'at al-anwâr, pp. 19 and 25 ff. (chap IV: that walâyat was
presented to men at the same time as tawhîd).
11 See Qâzî Sa'îd Qommî, Kitâb asrâr al-Hajj (supra p. 98, n. 66), chapter
V, which begins with a long hadîth of the sixth Imâm concerning the secret
of the Black Stone (cf. our study on The Configuration of the Temple of
Ka'ba as the Secret of Spiritual Life, in Eranos-Jahrbuch XXXIV, pp. 129
ff. ) « What comes to my mind, » writes Qâzî Sa'îd, « to explain this
mysterious account, is that the best that can be said is that the reception of
the commitment (mithâq) took place in several successive abodes or levels,

30
 The Shi'i doctors agree on the meaning of the scene of the
primordial « Covenant » described in the Qur'anic verse 7:171,
on the scope of the question put to mankind in the mystery of
meta-history: « Am I not your Lord » (A-lasto bi-rabbi-kom?).
Along with tawhîd, the commitment to the message of the
prophets to come and to the imâmat of their Imâms12 was
proposed to all the posterity of Adam13. Although mankind
responded with a « yes », its teachers know that this « yes »
according to the descent of the thing from the Upper Heavens to the Lower
Heavens, » fol. 183. The Tafsîr Mir'at al-anwâr draws the same teaching
from a long hadîth of the fifth Imâm, where it is said among other things:
« Then He created the angels, then He showed Himself to them and received
from them the mithâq towards Himself as regards robûbîyat, towards
Mohammad as regards nobowwat, towards 'Alî as regards walâyat » p. 29.
There was therefore a mithâq prior to that which was required from the
Adam ancestor of the earthly Adamics (7:171). On the other hand, it will be
noted that the prostration of the angels before Adam (2: 28) would concern
only the lower malâ'ika, not the four angels supporting the Throne ('arsh),
nor those who are called al-'âlûna (the Sublime) and who are the Veils, the
Lights of the Haqîqat mohammadiya of which the Throne is constituted
(because it is precisely before these Lights shining in Adam that the malâ'ika
bowed down), nies Karûbîyûn (Cherubim) who are called the « angels of the
Veils ». Cf. Shaykh Ahmad Ahsâ'î, commentary on Ziyârat al-jâmi'a (supra
n. 48), p. 117. Imamite adamology, like Ismaili adamology, knows an Adam
on several levels (Adam al-akbar, Adam the major, the cosmic Adam, Adam
al-asghar, Adam the minor, the little Adam, etc.).
12 It is necessary to mention here one of the strongest pages of Mollâ
Sadrâ, commenting on the Qur'anic verse 7:171, in his great commentary on
Kolaynî, Sharh al-osûl mina'l-Kâfî, Tehran s. d. p. 321. Sadra refers to the
different levels of manifestation of souls (at the level of the world of the
Intelligences, the Malakût, the mundus imaginalis or barzakh, and finally the
physical world). He refers to Plato's doctrine of the pre-existence of souls
and notes its perfect concordance with verse 7:171. However, he considers
that one should not simply speak of pre-existence; one should take into
account that « over there » souls have another mode of being and
manifestation. The zohûr of which the verse speaks, the « lombs » which
contained the sons of Adam, were precisely the Intelligences, the 'oqûl as
being their « fathers », at the time of their pre-existence at the level of the
world of Intelligence. We will come back to this hermeneutic in the context
of a work specially devoted to Mollâ Sadrâ Shîrâzî. Let us simply observe
here that this agreement between Platonism and Shî'ism on the pre-existence

31
was not pronounced by all in the same way. But the fact
remains that in Adam's humanity, as was recalled above, was
deposited the pure substance of light of the prophetic messages
to come. It is precisely through this pure substance of light that
the Adam-man answers this « yes ». It is, in him, that which
utters this « yes » (and this is what is symbolized by the line of
hierohistory, the Prophet saying to the Imâm: « I and you, we
were the first to answer yes »). The dreaded burden before
which the heavens, the earth and the mountains had trembled,
man accepts to assume (Qur'an 33:72). And what he says yes
to is the very secret of theophanies, the mystery of the
revealed Face of the Unknowable, which can only be revealed
by concealing itself in Figures that reveal it, and this is what
gives us the permanent link between imâmology and esoterica.
There too, a grandiose hermeneutic is given free rein,
developing what in Shi'ite spirituality would correspond to the
De dignitate hominis theme of our Platonists of the
Renaissance. It was necessary that the man was violent and
unconscious to assume the deposit of such a formidable secret,
and under this aspect the two qualifications turn to his praise.
Haydar Âmoli says it: there are magnificent secrets there,
themes of an unfathomable depth. So he devoted a whole
treatise to them (Risâlat al-amâna), of which unfortunately we
have not been able to find any manuscript so far. However, we
can make up for it to a certain extent, by all that this same
Qur'anic verse (33:72) has inspired the Shi'ite commentators.
What is this violence and ignorance that man shows in
assuming the divine deposit? A courageous violence that man,

of souls was not inaugurated by Mollâ Sadrâ. Seven centuries earlier, Ibn
Bâbûyeh in his Kitâb al-I'tiqâdât (Symbol of Faith), a fundamental work for
Shi'ite thought, professed the doctrine of pre-existence in terms whose
Platonic resonance is striking.
13 On the implication of the recognition of the walâyat of the Imâms in the
"yes" (balâ) given in answer, on the "day of the Covenant" (mîthâq) to the
question "A-lasto ?" cf. especially the Tafsîr Mir'at al-anwâr, Moqadamat I,
Maqâlat II, 4th fasl, pp. 25

32
typified in Adam, does to himself: to assume the divine secret
is to annihilate his own self before the absolute Ipsity; it is to
decide to ignore everything that is other than God, to ignore
even that there is something other than God. At this limit, the
mystery of man is resolved in the mystery of God. The secret
of the Attestation of the One is to deny all that is not God, to
know that there is only God to be (this is what Haydar Âmolî
calls ontological tawhîd, in relation to which theological
tawhîd is only a first phase, such that, if one is immobilized in
it, one risks succumbing to the trap of metaphysical idolatry).
When a thing transgresses its limit, it is transformed into its
opposite. So it was with the violence and ignorance in
question: they had been, in fact, a heroic folly, a sublime
unconsciousness, without which the man-Adam could not
have assumed the secrets of God. The two qualifications here
are indeed in praise of man: Adam, by the concentration of his
spiritual energy (his himma), lifted the weight even though it
was beyond his strength. Someone asked him (who? The
symbolic story does not say): « You have prejudged your
strength. Didn't you know that the burden is crushing? » And
Adam replied, « I was ignorant of anything other than God 14. »
He could then assume the burden of the esoteric, the secret of
those to whom it was said, « You are my Face. »
For his part, Qâzî Sa'îd Qommî will say that in this state,
human knowledge is like spiritual circles, where, unlike
material circles, « it is the center that surrounds the
periphery. » The intelligence as center, « encompasses » all the
lights that are its knowledge. Hence « knowledge is a single
point of which only the ignorant make a multiplicity ». This
multiplicity bursts forth with the other, and that is why Qâzî
Sa'îd Qommî can say that it is to this ignorance that verse
33:7215 refers.
14 Cf. Mollâ Fathollâh, Minhaj al-Sâdiqîn (great commentary on the
Qurân in Persian, in 3 vol. in-fol.), Tehran 1309 h., vol. II, ad 33:72.
15 Cf. Qâzî Sa'îd Qommî, Commentary on the Tawhîd of Ibn Babûyeh,
chap. II, 35th hadîth, 4th matlab, fol. 137, who refers here to the Theology of

33
 Thus, as long as Adam, the man, does not know that there is
another than God to be, he is able to carry by the strength of
his sublime ignorance, the weight of the divine secrets: he is
the « theophoros ». From the moment when it is no longer
enough to be God, he ceases to ignore all that is other than
God, and at the same time, poses this other. The theophanic
figures are other than God; so why should he need their
mediation? And if their mediation is superfluous, why should
he not have direct access to the esoteric himself, without the
intermediary of an exoteric who manifests and reveals it? For
as long as there is another, he himself is also this other;
therefore why should he still need another than himself? The
sublime ignorance turns around and inverts itself into a vertigo
of pride before itself, a vertigo that blinds it to any recognition
of the other, and pushes it to appropriate everything that is of
the other. It is this vertigo that the hierohistory symbolically
tells.
The divine secret referred to in the Qur'anic verse 33:72 was
the walâyat of the Imâms; we now know the reason for this -
the reason why this walâyat was precisely the tree of paradise
which should not be touched, the tree which should not be
profaned. In his commentary on this verse, Imâm Ja'far al-
Sâdiq16 states that Adam was given the vision of the divine
superhumanity of the Fourteen Unsullied in the blazing Glory
of the Throne. Adam is astonished: is there then a humanit
superior to mine, created « in Heaven » before him? Now,
precisely the light of these superhumans, of this « celestial »
humanity, was the deposit that had been entrusted to him and

Aristotle. Haydar Âmolî has also commented at length on this verse; the
ignorance of the other is the foundation of ontological tawhîd. The secret of
the deposit entrusted to Adam was the walâyat of the Imâms, and Adam
having come to betray this deposit, the statement of the sixth Imâm then
takes on an extraordinary allusive significance: « Our cause is heavy,
difficult; only an angel of the highest rank, a prophet sent, or a believer
whose heart has been tested by God through faith, can assume it. »
16 Cf. the Kitâb al-Borhân (supra p. 101, n. 71), vol. III, pp. 340-342.

34
whose secet he had assumed. These, at the level of their
Adamic manifestation, were to be his own lineage. But this is
what is no longer enough for the Adam-man. This deposit
entrusted to him he wants to seize it for himself. He succumbs
to a vestige of ambition, transgresses his own limit by wanting
to reach himself, already, the rank which could be manifested
only at the end of his lineage, with the one who would be the
« Seal of the ».
This was to touch the « forbidden tree », to violate the
« discipline of the arcane ». The tree symbolizes both the
walâyat of the Imâms, which the Adam-man claims to replace,
and the science of the Imâms, the science of that humanity of
light (bashar nûrîyûn), which the Adam-man wants to reach
prematurely, although he has neither the strength nor the
capacity to bear it. « He is a violent and ignorant person. »
says verse 33:72. As Qâzî Sa'îd Qommî explains with
remarkable profundity, the knowing subject and the objects of
his knowledge (the cognoscibles) are necessarily equal in
level. The cognoscibles are actualized by the knowing subject,
just as the food becomes a part of the subject who feeds on it.
Now, by touching the tree of Knowledge, which was forbidden
to him, by « eating » its fruit, his « cognoscibles », Adam eo
ipso obliged them to « come down »; and this was, for him, eo
ipso, « to come down from paradise »17.
What is remarkable in this conception is the link thus
established between the transgression of Adam, of man, and
the transgression of the esoteric. The Shi'ite gnosis, as esoteric
of the Prophetic Revelation, rejected and persecuted by all
« the violet and the ignorant », could only be attentive, as it
was, to the meaning of this transgression, which is in fact a
regression that degrades knowledge, reducing it to an inferior
level, forbidding it to perceive the symbols. No more
hierognosis communicating with the universes beyond; no

17 Qâzî Sa'îd Qommî, Kitâb asrâr al-Hajj (supra p. 98, n. 66) chap. VII,
fol. 186.

35
more perception of suprasensible spiritual things. By rejecting
the weight of the divine secrets first assumed, by betraying the
deposit entrusted to him, man has become an agnostic. It is in
this sense that we can say that verse 33:72 links the mystery of
God and the mystery of man to each other.
No less remarkable is the consonance between the Ismaili
hermeneutic and the Twelver Shi'ite hermeneutic of Adam's
sin. For both of them it is not a drama of the flesh but a drama
of human knowledge. According to Ismaili hierohistory18,
Adam was constituted as a prophet and Imâm at the beginning
of our present « cycle of occultation » (dawr al-satr), the
conditions of which are totally different from those of the
cycle of epiphany (dawr al-kashf) which preceded it. The laws
of knowledge are different; man can only perceive spiritual
things through a thorough knowledge of correspondences. But
analogical knowledge, the perception of symbols, presupposes
the bipolarity of shari'at and haqîqat, of the positive letter and
the spiritual truth or gnosis, of the exoteric and the esoteric.
Now what Adam wants to reach, on the question of Iblis, is a
knowledge which is out of his measure: he claims to have a
direct perception of the esoteric, of the hidden spiritual reality,
by stripping it of the exoteric envelope through which it
appears and which signifies it (some theologians in fashion
nowadays speak of « demystification » and
« demythologization », without realizing what they are doing).
Adam wants to seize by violence a knowledge which is
essentially the science of the Resurrection, and which belongs
to the last Imâm of the cycle (the Qâ'im) to reveal to men. This

18 See the note Herméneutique spirituelle comparée (cited above p. 27, n.

4) where the chapters that Qâzî No'mân, in his Asâs al-ta'wil, dedicates to
Adam and Noah are studied. It is striking to note the convergence of the
spiritual hermeneutics of the case of Adam and the case of Noah with the
spiritual hermeneutics of Swedenborg in his Arcana caelestia (the detailed
references are given in the cited study). Cf. also our History of Islamic
Philosophy I, pp. 60 ff. 124 ff. and our study Divine Epiphany... (cited above
p. 95, n. 63), pp. 162 ff.

36
knowledge escaping him because it exceeds his capacity,
Adam finds himself only in front of his own nakedness, i.e. his
own inner darkness, his own ignorance. In wanting to « strip
off » the esoteric, what Adam does is to be stripped of the
garment of the divine Word which, like a robe of light,
dispelled all darkness within him. What is left then? The
recollection of the lost symbols, and this is what it means for
man to cover his nakedness with the « leaves of the garden »...
It is therefore understandable that the inner meaning of the
Qur'anic verses prescribing fidelity to the entrusted deposit,
Shi'ite esotericism, with Haydar Âmolî, understands the
imperative to which its own existence is linked: « O you who
are faithful, do not betray God and his Messenger, by
betraying the deposits that have been entrusted to you, since
you are among those who know » (8:27). We have been
shown what this entrusted deposit is, and now we can
understand that there are two ways to betray it, both of which
lead to the same result.
One can betray it by trying to take it by violence, by
stripping it of the envelope that conditions its transparency, by
renouncing the « discipline of the arcane » . In doing so, it is
left to the unfit who, unable to understand it, can only violate
and distort it. They confuse, for example, what is spiritual
resurrection and what is social insurrection; the finality of their
effort does not even reach the limit or the idea of the new
birth, spiritual birth (wilâdat rûhanîya) imposes its meaning.
But one can also betray the entrusted deposit by denying it
purely and simply, and this denial is remarkably facilitated by
the first form of betrayal, since by it the esoteric has already
ceased to be what it was, and its content has been distorted.
The pure and simple rejection is all forms of agnosticism, from
the pious agnosticism of the Doctors of the Law and their
social successors, to the positivism of the technocrats. The
former degrades the knowledge of spiritual things to the level
of the knowledge of natural or social things, the latter ignores

37
all spiritual science. The agreement with the rejection of all
that the esoteric connotes, the radical degradation of the
exoteric itself (the zâhir), because there can be no sharî'at in its
true state in the absence of gnosis ('irfan and haqîqat), and it is
absurd to speak of an « orthodox » Sufism as a Sufism that
would be without gnosis. Left to itself, the exoteric (the
sensible, the manifest), ceasing to symbolize with the
invisible, with the suprasensible, is no more than dead nature,
desiccated bark, derisory chrysalis. The sharî'at, such as it
understands it the legalistic and social religion, and the Nature
such as it questions it and exploits it the technocratic science,
are only two aspects of the same decay. Secularization and
socialization of the spiritual go hand in hand with the will to
power of a utilitarian and agnostic science. This is why the
external peril coming from the « technique » of the West is a
peril for the traditional Shi'ite Islam, only insofar as it would
have rejected, betrayed « the divine deposit assumed by
man » .
The heavier this deposit is, the more the Adam-man carries
it by his nostalgia and repentance, i.e. after having found it
after a long quest. There is among the talks of Imâm Ja'far a
magnificent symbolic story whose motif offers a striking
reminiscence of the famous Song of the Pearl in the Gnostic
book of the « Acts of Thomas » and which thus perhaps
provides us with the key to the symbolism of the « pearl » and
of the « quest for the pearl » (we shall find another
reminiscence in Sohrawardî's « The Reality of the Western
Exile », infra Book II). The Imâm asks a disciple: « Do you
know what the Black Stone is? (the Stone embedded in one of
the corners of the Ka'ba temple in Makkah)« . And the Imâm
told his disciple that the Black Stone had been an angel given
as a companion to Adam in paradise, to remind him of his
promise (his commitment, the mithâq). Better still, she was the
angel who, at the center of Adam's being, had been given the
responsibility of the « entrusted deposit« , for it is in the

38
malakût, the angelic world of the soul, that is, in the esoteric of
the visible world, that the scenes evoked by the Qur'anic
verses of the « Covenant« (7:171) and of the « entrusted
deposit« (33:72) are accomplished. When God returned to
Adam because of his repentance, he changed this Angel into a
« white pearl« which he projected from paradise to Adam
« going down« on the road to exile. But Adam did not
recognize it at first and saw it as just another stone. It was
necessary that by his repentance he peels off this pearl of its
coating, so that the pearl, by taking again its first form, speaks
to him, reminds him of his engagement and awakes in him the
memory of his fatherland of light. Then Adam wept. And again
the angel is hidden and disappears under the guise of a very
precious mineral, which Adam carries on his shoulder all
along the route that leads him from Ceylon to the Mecca.
When he is tired, the angel Gabriel, who accompanies him,
takes it off his shoulders and carries it in turn. This is how the
« angel of Adam« , the esoteric Adam, came into this world.
And the Black Stone was placed in one of the corners of the
Temple, which is at the center of the world, since the angel is
at the center of Adam's being19.
This deposit entrusted to him, the angel hidden in Adam, is
the weight of the divine secrets that Adam, after having found
the pearl of gnosis, carries with him. So heavy is the weight
that Gabriel, the angel of knowledge and revelation, must help
him carry it.
Also, the Imâms of Shî'ism have repeated one after the other
the sentence that we already know: « Our cause is difficult,
heavy to take on; only an Angel of the highest rank, or a
prophet sent, or a believer whose heart God has tested for faith
is capable of it.« We shall see later (chap. V) that this
statement of the Imâms preludes all their esoteric teaching.

19 For the « secret of the Black Stone » as explained in a long hadîth of

Imâm Ja'far al-Sâdiq, commented by Qâzî Sa'îd Qommî, see our study on
The Configuration of the Ka'ba Temple (cited above p. 102, n. 73), pp. 130ff.

39
These tested believers are those of the Shi'is whose « yes« ,
whose acquiescence at the pre-eternal scene of the
« Covenant«. was without reluctance, those who « were
created with a ray of the light of the Fourteen Immaculate« .
Imâm Ja'far also alludes to this in the great hadîth which we
have quoted here earlier (supra p. 52): « Our cause is
difficult,« said the Imâm. To support it, we need consciences
where the dawn rises, hearts ablaze with light, healthy souls,
beautiful natures. It is because God has already received the
commitment of our Shi'ites [...]. O my God! Let them live by
our life, let them die by our death. Let not the enemy prevail
over them, for if you let the enemy prevail over them, there
will be no one left to worship you in this world.20 »
These are the witnesses who assume the integral shî'ism and
perpetuate the transmission of the gnosis in this world (the
silsilat al-'irfân); they are the ones who can carry the weight of
the entrusted deposit, assume the cause of the Imâms, because
they are the believers « whose hearts God has tested by faith« ,
and that is why there were never more than a handful of true
believers around the Imâms... These are the ones to whom we
hear the first Imâm alluding already during a conversation
with his disciple Komayl.

20 This is the long hadîth already quoted above and referred to in note
23 on page 52.

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