#ali kazim

[chainsawpunk]

Ali Kazim, Sleep III, 2008, pigments on wasli paper, 29 ⅛ x 21 ¼ in (74 x 54 cm)

[thunderstruck9]

Ali Kazim (Pakistani, 1979), Night Traveller I, 2008. Pigment on wasli, 50 x 32 cm.

[nununiverse]

Ali Kazim

[garadinervi]

Suheir Hammad (سهير حماد), Rafah, in Born Palestinian, Born Black & The Gaza Suite, Introduction by Marco Villalobos, Afterword by Kazim Ali, UpSet Press, New York, NY, 2010, p. 90

[crystalclaire]

A book of poems is an abbey of aspirants, each reciting a line to herself in meditation.

“On the Line” by Kazim Ali

[poemmedicine]

Ramadan

Kazim Ali

You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches, and have to choose between the starving month’s nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings. The liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter? If the ground-water is too scarce one can stretch nets into the air and harvest the fog. Hunger opens you to illiteracy, thirst makes clear the starving pattern, the thick night is so quiet, the spinning spider pauses, the angel stops whispering for a moment— The secret night could already be over, you will have to listen very carefully— You are never going to know which night’s mouth is sacredly reciting and which night’s recitation is secretly mere wind—

[todaynewsupdate]

Interview of "RAZA KAZIM" with Host Muhammad Ali Raza (Daily Independent News Paper) TODAY, TWO RAZA’S ARE SITTING TOGETHER

Muhammad Ali Raza is a program anchor and journalist of Pakistan who conducted a written interview with the famous philosopher Raza Kazim. I have reached that now it has become very difficult to communicate with him, so I am looking for your written article. I hope knowing about Raza Kazim will be very beneficial and full of knowledge for you.

He invented a musical instrument, the Sagar Veena, of which his daughter Noor Zehra is the only player in Pakistan, and through her is the grandfather of the famous pop-rock band Noori duo, Ali Noor and Ali Hamza, while another daughter, Baela Raza Jamil, is one of Pakistan's leading educators, with major contributions in the field of education reform. He is also the uncle of actress and model Juggan Kazim. Raza’s journey of rejecting ugliness and pursuing human happiness, which got him involved with society, politics and the questions of his time, began in 1942, at the age of 12, when he became a part of the Indian Congress movement. After 1945 he moved away from the Congress movement and got involved with the Muslim League movement working for an independent Pakistan. After doing his LLB in 1953 he began his law practice and from 1959 onwards became Advocate Supreme Court of Pakistan. By 1965 he began to have serious doubts about the validity of the Marxist ideology but he persevered with it till 1970. In between, in 1962, he also designed the world’s first shrimp factory ship which was made by a team of Norwegian naval architects and engineers. After 1970 he began his quest of discovering a post-Marxist theory of social change, yet another attempt to address the issue of human happiness, in the light of the explosive progress in science and technology and developments in Brain Sciences, Astrophysics & Particle Physics. In 1995, he set up ‘Sanjan Nagar Institute of Philosophy and Arts’ (SIPA), as a laboratory for developing and testing this emerging theory,

which he calls ‘Evolutionary Mentology’, and has been funding it from his Law practice ever since. In the same year he also started a parallel organization called Sanjan Nagar Public Education Trust (SNPET) which runs a free school for girls in a working class area of Lahore. He currently devotes his time to the Sanjan Nagar Institute of Philosophy & Arts, a non-profit organization consisting of a team of fifty (now growing) full-time members working in the fields of Philosophy, Music and Photography. The Institute is currently based in Lahore. It is an honor for me to meet Raza Kazim. I am sitting with a person who is not only a philosopher but also a person with a very beautiful heart. He dedicated his life to serve country. This is my introductory meeting. I wanted to record Raza's interview but life did not cooperate. His age is around 95 years now I talked to Raza a lot while he couldn't even speak, he talked like children but as a journalist I will say this about Raza that "Pakistan has been made big by such people and it is because of him. In the love of the soil of the country, they turn themselves into soil, we should not only value such personalities, but it is also our duty to protect them.” May God bless Raza Kazmi with thousands of blessings and shower his mercy on him always. https://sanjannagar.wordpress.com/raza-kazim/

[meusgrifos]

With thick strokes of ink the sky fills with rain. Pretending to run for cover but secretly praying for more rain.

Over the echo of the water, I hear a voice saying my name. No one in the city moves under the quick sightless rain.

The pages of my notebook soak, then curl. I’ve written: “Yogis opened their mouths for hours to drink the rain.”

The sky is a bowl of dark water, rinsing your face. The window trembles; liquid glass could shatter into rain.

I am a dark bowl, waiting to be filled. If I open my mouth now, I could drown in the rain.

I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me. The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.

— Kazim Ali, "Rain".

[generouswindow]

Home

by KAZIM ALI

My father had a steel comb with which he would comb our hair.

After a bath the cold metal soothing against my scalp, his hand cupping

my chin.

My mother had a red pullover with a little yellow duck embroidered

on it and a pendant made from a gold Victoria coronation coin.

Which later, when we first moved to Buffalo, would be stolen from

the house.

The Sunn’i Muslims have a story in which the angels cast a dark mark

out of Prophet Mohammad’s heart, thus making him pure, though the

Shi’a reject this story, believing in his absolute innocence from birth.

Telling the famous Story of the Blanket in which the Prophet covers

himself with a Yemeni blanket for his afternoon rest. Joined under

the blanket first by his son-in-law Ali, then each of his grandchildren

Hassan and Hussain and finally by his daughter Bibi Fatima.

In Heaven Gabriel asks God about the five under the blanket and

God says, those are the five people whom I loved the most out of all

creation, and I made everything in the heavens and the earth for

their sake.

Gabriel, speaker on God’s behalf, whisperer to Prophets, asks God, can

I go down and be the sixth among them.

And God says, go down there and ask them. If they consent you may go

under the blanket and be the sixth among them.

Creation for the sake of Gabriel is retroactively granted when the group

under the blanket admits him to their company.

Is that me at the edge of the blanket asking to be allowed inside.

Asking the 800 hadith be canceled, all history re-ordered.

In Hyderabad I prayed every part of the day, climbed a thousand steps

to the site of Maula Ali’s pilgrimage.

I wanted to be those stairs, the hunger I felt, the river inside.

I learned to pronounce my daily prayers from transliterated English

in a book called “Know Your Islam,” dark blue with gold calligraphed

writing that made the English appear as if it were Arabic complete with

marks above and below the letters.

I didn’t learn the Arabic script until years later and never learned the

language itself.

God’s true language: Hebrew. Latin. Arabic. Sanskrit.

As if utterance fit into the requirements of the human mouth.

I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence

of stars.

When Abraham took Isaac up into the thicket his son did not know

where he was being led.

When his father bound him and took up the knife he was shocked.

And said, “Father, where is the ram?”

Though from Abraham’s perspective he was asked by God to sacrifice

his son and proved his love by taking up the knife.

Thinking to himself perhaps, Oh Ismail, Ismail, do I cut or do I burn.

I learned God’s true language is only silence and breath.

Fourth son of a fourth son, my father was afflicted as a child and

as was the custom in those days a new name was selected for him to

protect his health.

Still the feeling of his rough hand, gently cupping my cheek, dipping the

steel comb in water to comb my hair flat.

My hair was kept so short, combed flat when wet. I never knew my hair

was wavy until I was nearly twenty-two and never went outside with wet

and uncombed hair until I was twenty-eight.

At which point I realized my hair was curly.

My father’s hands have fortune-lines in them cut deeply and dramatic.

The day I left his house for the last time I asked him if I could hold his

hand before I left.

There are two different ways of going about this.

If you have known this for years why didn’t you ask for help, he

asked me.

Each time I left home, including the last time, my mother would hold a

Quran up for me to walk under. Once under, one would turn and kiss

the book.

There is no place in the Quran which requires acts of homosexuality to

be punishable by lashings and death.

Hadith or scripture. Scripture or rupture.

Should I travel out from under the blanket.

Comfort from a verse which also recurs: “Surely there are signs in this

for those of you who would reflect.”

Or the one hundred and four books of God. Of which only four are

known—Qur’an, Injeel, Tavrat, Zubuur.

There are a hundred others—Bhagavad-Gita, Lotus Sutra, Song of

Myself, the Gospel of Magdalene, Popul Vuh, the book of Black Buffalo

Woman—somewhere unrevealed as such.

Dear mother in the sky you could unbuckle the book and erase all the

annotations.

What I always remember about my childhood is my mother whispering

to me, telling me secrets, ideas, suggestions.

She named me when I moved in her while she was reading a calligraphy

of the Imam’s names. My name: translated my whole life for me as

Patience.

In India we climbed the steps of the Maula Ali mountain to the top,

thirsting for what.

My mother had stayed behind in the house, unable to go on pilgrimage.

She had told me the reason why.

Being in a state considered unacceptable for prayers or pilgrimages.

I asked if she would want more children and she told me the name she

would give a new son.

I always attribute the fact that they did not, though my eldest sister’s first

son was given the same name she whispered to me that afternoon, to my

telling of her secret to my sisters when we were climbing the stairs.

It is the one betrayal of her—perhaps meaningless—that I have never

forgiven myself.

There are secrets it is still hard to tell, betrayals hard to make.

You hope like anything that though others consider you unclean God

will still welcome you.

My name is Kazim. Which means patience. I know how to wait.

[april-is]

April 22, 2024: Kinder Than Man, Althea Davis

Kinder Than Man Althea Davis

And God please let the deer on the highway get some kind of heaven. Something with tall soft grass and sweet reunion. Let the moths in porch lights go someplace with a thousand suns, that taste like sugar and get swallowed whole. May the mice in oil and glue have forever dry, warm fur and full bellies. If I am killed for simply living, let death be kinder than man.

--

Also: + The Mower, Philip Larkin + Good People, W.S. Merwin + A Blessing, James Wright + In the Nursing Home, Jane Kenyon

Today in:

2023: Dearest,, Jean Valentine 2022: Birth, Louise Erdrich 2021: Cicada, Hosho McCreesh 2020: Future Memories, Mario Meléndez 2019: Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman, Anne Sexton 2018: First Night, D. Nurkse 2017: Einstein’s Happiest Moment, Richard M. Berlin 2016: Yiddishland, Erika Meitner 2015: July, Kazim Ali 2014: This Morning in a Morning Voice, Todd Boss 2013: Paralysis, Peter Boyle 2012: from Mayakovsky, Frank O’Hara 2011: Northern Pike, James Wright 2010: Humpbacks, Mary Oliver 2009: Alone, Jack Gilbert 2008: From Blossoms, Li-Young Lee 2007: For Grace, After A Party, Frank O’Hara 2006: Wild Geese, Mary Oliver 2005: A Brief for the Defense, Jack Gilbert

[llovelymoonn]

favourite poems of april

daniel nyikos potato soup

mary oliver when death comes

walt whitman leaves of grass: “whoever you are holding me now in hand”

kazim ali refuge temple

d.a. powell republic

toi derricotte natural birth: “november”

cathy song the age of reptiles

dante émile sharing a cigarette with joan of arc

rigoberto gonzalez other fugitives and other strangers: “the strangers who find me in the woods”

mary oliver new and selected poems: “the summer day”

d.a. powell chronic: “continental divide”

kahlil gibran the seven selves

franz wright night walk

mary oliver the black snake

martha collins day unto day: “over time”

ada limón the bird knows he is going to die and wishes not to (recommended to me by @craigslistening <33)

aish (@sapientes) rubin’s vase

tom pickard nectarine

alicia ostriker song

d.a. powell the expiration date on the world is not quite the same as the expiration date on my prophylactic

james dickey the whole motion: collected poems 1945-1992: “the strength of fields”

everett owens strength from a mountain

denise levertov o taste and see: new poems: “the secret”

david st. john the place that inhabits us: “peach fires”

robinson jeffers their beauty has more meaning

thomas centolella almost human: “the hope i know”

elizabeth willis address: “in strength sweetness

amiri baraka s o s: poems 1961-2013: “tender arrivals”

mary oliver the black walnut tree

stephen spender new collected poems: “song”

support me

[songofwizardry]

belated Ramadan Mubarak!

I try to do a bit of reading every Ramadan, so, for accountability, and so that when I inevitably don’t get through them I can find my list next year—here's my (extremely very ambitious) reading list for this year!

(suggestions are very welcome, with the warning that I very much may not get through them. this year, I’m trying to learn more about Islam and liberation theology and I’m trying to read more abolitionist texts, and of course my standard queer Muslim books, I’m trying to read more poetry by Muslim poets I don’t know well, and every Ramadan I try and only read fiction by Muslim authors, so there’s some sff on here too!)

non-fic:

memoirs:

We Have Always Been Here by Samra Habib (reread)

Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H

The Colour of God by Ayesha S Chaudhry

Love is an Ex-Country by Randa Jarrar

A Dutiful Boy by Mohsin Zaidi

other nonfic:

Islam and Anarchism by Mohamed Abdou

We Do This Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba (reread-ish? I never fully finished it)

Let This Radicalise You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba

Qur'an and Woman by Amina Wadud (which I also never finished)

The Women's Khutbah Book by Fatima Seedat and Sa'diyya Shaikh

Qur’an of the Oppressed: Liberation Theology and Gender Justice in Islam by Shadaab Rahemtulla

With Stones in Our Hands: Writings on Muslims, Racism, and Empire by Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana

fiction:

The Candle and the Flame by Nafiza Azad

Mirage by Somaiya Daud (yes I still have not read this)

The Light at the Bottom of the World by London Shah

Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion by Bushra Rehman

A Tempest of Tea by Hafsah Faisal

poetry:

Halal If You Hear Me (anthology)

If They Come For Us by Fatimah Asghar (reread)

Hagar Poems by Mohja Kahf

Bad Diaspora Poems by Momtaza Mehri

The Fortieth Day by Kazim Ali

Black Seeds by Tariq Touré

Postcolonial Banter by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

[nununiverse]

Ali Kazim  Metropolitan Museum of Art  

[garadinervi]

Suheir Hammad (سهير حماد), Born Palestinian, Born Black & The Gaza Suite, Introduction by Marco Villalobos, Afterword by Kazim Ali, UpSet Press, New York, NY, 2010

Cover Photograph: Tarek Aylouch Cover and Text Design: Aaron Kenedi

[therumpus]

The Myriad Worlds We Each Contain: Mini-Interview with Maya Jewell Zeller

By Janet Rodriguez

Maya Jewell Zeller writes poems that glitter, like crystal snowflakes, and land with such beautiful grace you might not expect them to be the swift agents of change they are. Zeller’s most recent collection of poetry, Out Takes / Glove Box (New American Press, 2023), selected by Eduardo Corral for the New American Poetry Prize, is a gift to her readers. Structured in five distinct sections, each containing thematically focused poems, Zeller paints image after image of beauty and starkness, life and death, science and history, motherhood and loneliness. Diane Seuss describes the book as enchanting, where “the vehicles that carry us into and out of imaginative spaces abound.” Zeller’s newest project, Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), is the equally impressive flip side of a proverbial coin. Complementing the creative surface, Advanced Poetry is a college textbook with a diverse canon. Upon closer examination, the anthology is an ice-cutter of college texts, where readers and educators alike are challenged “to push their writing and reading into new understandings and innovations, across varied and inclusive global aesthetics.”

In May of 2024, Zeller was featured at the Lion Rock Visiting Writers Series at Central Washington University, which was broadcast for those of us who couldn’t be there in person. She had recently returned from a month-long residency at the University of Oxford, where she worked on current and future creative projects, a place where she “was also able to rest and gather up energy for the next stretch of work.” 

Through a series of emails, Zeller and I discussed what structure means for a writer, how creativity is sparked through inspiration, and why landscapes inspire her poetry and conversation.

***

The Rumpus: I love how Out Takes / Glove Box takes the reader on a  multifaceted journey through the imagination. When someone asks you what your book is, what do you say? 

Maya Jewell Zeller: I think of it as maybe an avant-garde, indie, documentary film, or a museum with several curated and related exhibits. I really want readers to feel invited and welcome in it, even as the protagonist is very specifically a version or many versions of myself—my girl-self, my woman-self, my mother-self, middle-aged, in the academy, in late capitalism, feeling the extreme othering and splitting effects of the economic over selfhood, as she wills magic back into her life, and defends her rights to her reproductive system and her mind’s way of mapping image and narrative. I’m so grateful to Diane Seuss for her insightful and generous blurb, as well as to Eduardo Corral, Laura Read, and Carol Guess for how they all saw parts of the book that others didn’t—that kind of close reading and validation of what the book is doing as an art space.  It felt like they understood its very viscera.

Rumpus: The five sections of the book contain complementary poems that are also very different from one another. Why did you structure the book this way?

Zeller: I think of the book’s shape as a Wunderkammer or Commonplace book on a self, fractured by contemporary pressures and mended by everyday joys. I often quote Kazim Ali on his own writing of Bright Felon, a hybrid text which he says, “wrote itself out of requirement.” I feel this way about my own organic forms, both in terms of poetic structure and in terms of a collection’s arc. In a lineage with Denise Levertov and Hopkins, I do believe art rises up and out of us and we need to listen to its need for unconventional orders, disjunctive music, and surreal images. EJ Ianelli asked me about this—which he called “difficult poetry”— in a Spokane Public Radio interview back in fall, and I told him that rendering a difficult world into art often requires us to take shapes that fragment narrative. 

In the case of Out Takes, the book’s five sections feel to me like a cabinet of curiosities or a curated set of museum rooms. It begins with a frontis poem, “Field Girl Come Home,” which is both an invocation/invitation from the mud fields, and a documentation of setting in which we might imagine the book takes place. Section 1 follows that [with] a set of poems that are “documentary” and then a series of “out takes” from that documentary—developing the conceit of film, through deep image poetics. Section 2 are all autobiographical poems of the speaker’s self, past and present. Section 3 practices embodied poetics by taking the voice of a persona: a woman who has been institutionalized because she believes she used to be a mermaid. This mythic, lyric imagining, I hope, creates a space in which we ultimately believe women—who are rarely believed, in our imaginary and real worlds—and also follow these women’s emotional truths to deeper understandings. Section 4 is a set of spells, which reiterate the need for magic as a healing space. It also suggests that revision and re-seeing allow us to fully inhabit. This section repeats two versions of one poem—the way the book keeps insisting that more than one way of existing deserves equal space. Finally, Section 5 returns us to a series of outtakes: surreal dreamscapes that pull from the book’s imagery and narrative suggestions and deepen those threads. We are invited to imagine, again, the whole book as a film with a cutting room floor ready for more collage-making.

I hope the book also serves as an invitation to create form, imagine one’s own art and art life as complicated and worth sharing in whatever shape it needs to take, to invent models, to move outside normative expectations for both poetic and book structures and allow the material itself–and our deep imaginative spaces and diverse reading canons—to guide us. 

Rumpus: The language in your poetry is thoughtful, but dangerous. Precise, but deadly. I feel like my skin is being detached from me as I'm reading. What is it about language that can do this? 

Zeller: Detached skin! I love this, and I’m overjoyed that you had that visceral experience. It recalls the well-known moment in Emily Dickinson’s letter to T. W. Higginson: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.”  I love that—a feeling so many poets have written about since, and I do not pretend to really understand it—poets, who make art with words, sometimes translate an experience or feeling so successfully that someone else is able to also feel it, across time and space and in another body. That is what I always aspire to, and I’m honored you felt it. 

Rumpus: You began your reading with, “I am most comfortable when I am dissecting a dead cow..." I know I might be misquoting you, but you ended this part by saying, "I want to see the worlds inside of this..." How many worlds does a person possess deep inside?

Zeller: I was reading from my essay, “Scavenger Panorama,” originally published in Willow Springs Magazine and then listed as a Notable in Best American Essays 2023. I like to think that Vivian Gornick and anyone else who read it understood the Joan Didion feeling of being on nodding terms with our past (and present?) selves, the myriad worlds we each contain. I hope that it gives other writers—particularly those who don’t always feel themselves represented in literature—permission to share those worlds, to create space to expand them. 

Janet: How do your inherited landscapes influence your art?

Maya: My landscapes are both coastal and inland, in the Pacific Northwest, as well as probably some percent Iowan (my mother is from Des Moines). I hope that my connection to and love for these various watersheds and home-spaces comes through in the poetry—that it may be riparian and delta and converge and sheetwash and rivulet and soaking wet and barn-roof-beat, as well as ferned and mossed and also logged and fished and mud-rutted and salvaged and repurposed and gritty and glittery and full of tall grasses and flung seeds, hay and scrape and grass-cut legs and rusted gears. I hope it is as beautiful and complicated as the people and plants and animals in these places and the people who pass through, too. I think of other contemporary poets who write of rural spaces with both gentleness and unflinching questioning—poets like M.L. Smoker and Joe Wilkins and Vievee Francis and Kathryn Smith and Canese Jarboe, and feel an unwavering depth of gratitude that I get to be alive and working with language during this time, when the pastoral and antipastoral and necropastoral coexist in our conversations about life and love, on and off the page.

Rumpus: You collaborated with Kathryn Nuernberger to compile Advanced Poetry: A Writer's Guide and Anthology. It’s an ideal textbook: the most inclusive, representative sampling of modern and classical poetry. Is this the reason you traveled to England? What is your dream for this book?

Zeller: It’s always an honor to collaborate with Kate, and we were really thrilled to be able to bring more light to the poets in its pages and moreover, to encourage every person writing to curate their own canons. That, really, is our dream for this book—that it gives permission to poets at all stages of their careers to dream their own ways forward in a web of rhizomatic literary and other ancestries. 

Traveling to England was interesting at this stage in my own academic, creative, and personal lives because while I have genealogical roots in Scotland, and I feel at home in the green and gardens (and mud), my own upbringing was in rust and ravine and logging communities—people of physical labor, and not much “of the academy.” I always feel like an imposter in higher-ed, so I felt this even more at a prestigious school like Oxford, where you wear a formal academic gown to a swearing-in—and then to a dinner. These are beautiful events held in ancient halls and heralded sometimes by a horn and chalices of wine and gavels and by people who represent their fields with joy and depth and sometimes a public bravado and others a real nerdy shyness I find very charming. I want the poetry textbook to feel like all of that for its readers—but the swearing-in to poetry can be a ceremony the poet invents themselves, and the attire anything that feels holy to their own culture and creature, and honoring of their deep personal poetics, from any background or way of being. 

[questionsonislam]

What Quranic basis do Shia Muslims have for believing in 12 Imams who follow Muhammad (pbuh)? Where can we find solid Quranic proof that the Imams were decreed by God as successors to Muhammad? Shi’as often point to Muhammad's last sermon, the famous Ghadir Khom speech, and claim that he said "I leave you with the Quran and the ahl-al bayt." How much historical evidence do we have of Muhammad making such a statement? In short, is Shi'a Islam even valid?

Although the Shi’as are divided into some classes such as Ghaliya, Zaydiya and Imamiya, when it is said Shi’a, Imamiya is generally understood in our time.

After the passing away of the Prophet (pbuh) to the Eternal Realm, the Shi’as accept Hazrat Ali (may Allah be pleased with him) and his two sons in order and his grandsons as the legal imam (caliph) by the determination and the will of the Prophet and they regard believing in the twelve imams as a foundation of the faith. Therefore, that group is called as “Ithna Ashariyya” since they accept only the twelve imams as the imams; it is called as “Imamiya” since they accept believing in the imams as a condition of the faith; and it is called as “Ja’fariyya” since they rely on the opinions of Imam Ja’far as-Sadiq both in faith and worship and acts.

The Shi’as are of the opinion that the imamate, namely, the caliphate is not from the “minor” acts which can be left to the desire and election of the Muslims as the Sunnis accept. According to them, imamate is a pillar existing in the basis of the religion and takes place among the fundamentals of the faith. Therefore, the Shi’as have to believe in the existence of the imam in the same way as they believe in Allah, the prophets and the Day of Judgment. According to that faith, the imams are innocent just like the prophets; they never commit a minor or a major sin, they do not behave unjustly; a person who does not know them becomes an unbeliever. Moreover, “Their commands are the commands of Allah, their prohibitions are His prohibitions. Obeying them is obeying Allah; disobedience to them is disobedience to Allah.”

Iran, which accepts Imamiya as a formal madhhab (school of law) today, has given the duty of imamate including the religious authority to “Ayatullah al-Uzma” (Great Sign of Allah). Therefore, absolute obedience to that “imam” is obligatory. Opposing him is like opposing Allah and the Prophet. In the Iranian constitution, where the article “The formal religion of Iran is Islam and its school of law is Ithna Ashari Ja’afari. And that article can never be changed” takes place, believing in the “Twelve Imams” is accepted as an important principle.

The issue of imamate, considered as above, does not take place among the fundamentals of the religion in any way according to the Sunnis. The imam, namely the caliph, comes to the mission by the conferring and the election of the Muslims. Any person possessing the determined attributes in the matters of the world and the hereafter can undertake the management of the Muslims. He cannot be innocent and sinless in any way.

In regard to the opinion of the Sunnis about the Twelve Imams; the eleven imams (their number is twelve with Hazrat Ali) are exalted saints and authorities in point of merit, godliness and spiritual ranks.

Badiuzzaman mentions the twelve imams while listing the persons who are the objects of mystery of the hadith “The scholars of my community are like the prophets of the Children of Israel.” He introduces the twelve imams as the great people of the Sunnis by stating “The people of fact, first of all, the Sunnis as the Four Imams (the imams of the four schools of law) and the Ithna Ashara Imams (the Twelve Imams) of the Family of the Prophet..” in another statement of him.

The Twelve Imams are the following persons: Hazrat Ali, Hazrat Hasan, Hazrat Hussain, Ali bin Hussain, Muhammad Baqir, Ja’far as-Sadiq, Musa Kazim, Ali Riza, Muhammad Taqi, Ali Naqi, Hasan Asghari and Muhammad Mahdi (may Allah be pleased with them.)