I put my trust in the Lord, exalted above the limitations imposed by transgressors and apostates, and seek approach to Him through His servant, the Qāʾim, for the destruction of whoever doubts Him and departs from the ranks of religion. From the weak, helpless, impoverished, possessed servant, needy of the mercy of his Master, the Imam who stands to cast down the banners of falsehood, uncover the beliefs of impostors, and sever the religious law of the Pharaohs, the devils, and the party that denies the signs of the wisdom of the Qāʾim of Truth and the return of his manifestation, and repudiates his rising to judge the worlds and bring about their resurrection.
This is to awaken those whom fabrication has lulled into heedlessness and to establish the proof against the renegade, covenant-breaking faction. The warning is meant to awaken those who fabricate excuses, and every pretended Pharaoh, so that proof is established before the return; at the time of discrimination the soul goes back to its vile element and undergoes the full measure of its misery.
Now then: grandeur, overwhelming power, majesty, and dominion belong to the Lord whose sacred divinity is exalted above everything reason imagines concerning absence or presence, every expression devised in speech, and everything stirring in the hidden places of hearts and breasts. He is above the cause of causes that exist through the ages and periods; He brings His command to pass and guides nations by victory and conquest after every renegade, denying unbeliever has despaired. He cuts the cords of those who join themselves to falsehood, turn from truth, doubt the reality of the Manifestation, or slander the ranks of religion with lies and calumnies.
May the Guardian's prayers rest increasingly upon the obedient ranks of his Call, those who await his promised manifestation, call humanity to him in truth to seek his pleasure, and submit even to the smallest of his servants, awaiting the return of security beneath the banners of his truth. They separate themselves from whoever turns away through blindness of perception or doubts his appearance because the period has seemed long. The trials of his wisdom have exposed others through despair, hypocrisy, tyranny, disobedience, obstinacy, and deprivation. He said: “Know that my absence from you is an absence of trial for you and for the people of all religions.”
Through this trial the disguises of pretenders are exposed, and the apostasy of those who doubt the Guardian of Truth is shown, so that the people of truth may differ from them in belief, speech, and action, and confront them with the decisive argument. Their souls have been displaced by the assaults of desire and have joined the forms of obstinate apostates as the appointed day approaches. The time of concealment, taking advantage of their weakness, has drawn them toward the element of falsehood and disclosed the filthy beliefs formerly hidden behind their coverings.
O smallest and most contemptible company, O wretched faction—and those who have misled it by lying inventions! Diseased souls have made alluring but evil promises seem good to you. Through corrupted intentions you have substituted transient accidents for the realities of meaning. You have treated the Exalted Creator as though He did not exist, and transferred the station of the Guardian of Truth through false claims and deception to the least of his feeble servants, seeking to elevate yourselves above humanity by disguising and corrupting religion for the perishing goods of this world.
O Lord, witness that I utterly reject this false, detestable assertion, compounded of deception and hypocrisy. Curse whoever is satisfied with it and holds it as a belief, for they remain in impurity, doubt, and abandonment. Crush the adherent of this contemptible opinion, and confound this feeble, lying pretender whose insolence has brought him so far.
By God, this address is painful to me, but falsehood has no standing beside truth. There can be no indulgence or honor for a person who holds such a belief. I speak only to honor the truth and the obedient ranks of those endowed with understanding.
By God, I know that you have accepted this claim only because false premises, established in your minds by heedlessness and illusion, led you to it. Through Shaykh Abū al-Qāsim and Shaykh Abū al-Khayr I explained the vileness of the opinion and the impurity of its originator; I refuted his words with sound knowledge. What then made you depart from the perfection of obedience and the right road, and doubt the counsel of a truthful guide?
May our Lord, the Divine Judge, repudiate whoever is content with this statement or accepts this belief. May He dissociate the people of truth from it, and cast its believer into the basest form and most impure body. And may the God of gods curse, banish, and chastise me with punishments beyond my strength, if I ever imagined the wickedness you attribute to me, suggested it, or allowed it to pass through my thought, awareness, or senses. May He accept neither excuse nor repentance from me should I deserve this repudiation. Whoever after such an oath still repeats the accusation or nurtures suspicion belongs to the accursed company of apostasy, disobedience, and associationism. You have committed wickedness and brought others into it; you have made associations in religion and caused others to do so; you have departed from its bounds and led others astray. The curse and displeasure of the Creator are upon you if you persist in this belief and despair of His mercy.
By God, the person who denies grace and favor is no worse in my sight than the one who attaches this innovation to a weak servant, professing obedience and servitude, who is the smallest servant of the Guardian of the Age. O least and most wretched of men, O corruption of this age! Know that your souls and the soul of the man who led you astray have wandered away from the meanings of truth through their inadequacy. Unable to confront the radiance of true realities, they have welcomed lies and abandoned truth. What you have put forward, and what that wretched man put forward, turned you away from the unity of the Exalted Creator and from knowledge of the Imam. You have retained the language of the obedient only through your outward likeness to them in natural constitution and bodily form. Your souls, and that of your deceiver, were unable from the beginning to attain the noble element. Therefore they became too feeble to affirm the Creator's transcendence above verbal definition and description. You doubted the sacred station of the Imam, treated him as nonexistent, and blindly pointed instead to one of the least and weakest of created servants.
By God, he who led you from truth lied and made you drink a bitter poison. He destroyed the community and filled it with the winds of misfortune, corruption, associationism, and hypocrisy. If he and you had possessed discrimination and reason, and had sought truth with the intelligence that distinguishes the superior from the inferior, you would have known that I would be answerable for your wrongdoing if I concealed the truth from you. I would deserve punishment if I prevented you from knowing the Imam, for I would have deceived you and defrauded all humanity.
And you people of ignorance: if the Imam reviles whoever recognizes him, disowns whoever acknowledges him, and curses the person who affirms his imamate, how could any argument remain to him, or to the Creator, against the nations? How could the person who opposed or disobeyed him be punished if the Imam himself had hidden the truth from him? The sentence involving God's judgment and revealing a concealed secret is badly corrupted.
As for what Ibn al-Kurdī cited to you from the wisdom called The Healing, by the truth itself he lied, altered the text, and acted as a devil. He sought to extinguish truth with falsehood, and his fabrication has divided you, who had been united, into parties. He has filled hearts once purified with doubt, despair, obstinacy, and hypocrisy.
As for the sentence he quoted from the wisdom in support of his fabrication, he intended to associate someone with the exalted Creator and to abolish obedience to the Imam. He treated it as if it were a statement addressed to the Pharaohs of Syria, those foolish and coarse people who, in their ignorance, did not understand the age of concealment, when the nations lived in blindness and error. The Exalted Creator brought them from nonexistence to existence through the teaching of the Imam, the standing Guide, the Active Intellect.
If the author of The Healing did not acknowledge that it came from the overflowing wisdom of the standing and guiding Imam, and that its author was a weak servant yielding obedience and submission in gratitude for his Master's favors, he would be cursed and driven away, as Ibn al-Kurdī is driven away for exploiting this name to raise his standing and thereby debasing it. He sought to tie together the cords of falsehood, but truth tore them apart.
Had that ignorant covenant-breaker understood that The Healing establishes existence as an argument against men like him—followers of demonic invention, associationism, and denial—he would have examined what comes after the passage and recognized its author's confession of weakness, inability, submission, and prostration. I claim none of that station for myself, nor can I express its truths through any power of my own. Whatever is right and well said in that epistle comes from the blessing of the Qāʾim of the Age, Guardian of grace and goodness; whatever is mistaken belongs to me and is laid upon me. I ask forgiveness of the one who knows my innermost thoughts better than I do and beg Him to guide me to the straighter path.
This brings the noses of the lying claimants low. For the Guardian's wisdom, in the admonition and warning, says: “Know that my absence from you is an absence of testing, for you and for the people of all religions. Whoever remains steadfast in what he was entrusted with and does not turn back on his heels, I shall give him a great reward and grant him a noble station. Whoever turns backward, loses himself, rejects truth, and lends an ear to Satan's whispers shall fall under tribute and suffer humiliation and disgrace as the recompense of his own deeds.”
This is proof enough for whoever has deceived himself through pretense, apostasy, and wrongdoing. Wake up, apostates, if you persist in this condemned unbelief, before you are made to pay the tribute and wear the distinguishing dress of subjugation, you killers of truth and doers of sin!
To rely on an isolated saying of a servant of religion as authority is mere imitation outside the order of knowledge, a retreat into error and delusion. That is all this coarse man could manage because of the poverty of his understanding. The scales of wisdom, the truth of religion, acknowledgement, justice, and fair dealing establish among the people of truth that the Exalted Creator is displeased with whoever denies the appearance of the Qāʾim of the Age and his judgment of humanity after the absence of examination. This is the very Imam whose appointment was declared publicly before witnesses: at his manifestation he will take vengeance by the Lord's sword upon the people of doubt, apostasy, and obstinacy.
Alas for you! This is proclaimed where all the world may hear, by a great multitude of people who have gathered across the regions and lands. The Exalted Creator repudiates this renegade and pretended faction; the Guardian of the Age and his ranks curse and disown whoever refuses to disown the impurity of the one who led you astray—Ibn al-Kurdī—so long as they accept his adorned lies and maintain what that impure man has invented for them, seeking worldly goods because of his weak understanding, feeble religion, and error. Many have already renounced his demonic pretense and false claims, recognizing the greatness of his ignorance.
This is the separation of the people of truth from the apostate covenant-breakers, and a decisive argument against the falsehood of whoever denies it and persists in departing from religion. Brothers, repent of the heedlessness that led you away from governing truth! Repudiate before the Guardian of religion the person who became a devil, led you from the truth, and seduced you. Return to complete obedience, justice, reason, and fairness. Abandon this heedlessness, and do not follow the people of doubt. The person who counsels you seeks no payment, yet you wrong him.
O Lord, take by the forelocks those who have mistaken falsehood for truth and lead them to truth and right guidance. When their intentions have become sincere, turn them from the ways of corruption. Bring them to acknowledge the manifest signs of the appearance of the standing, guiding Imam and this great news. Praise belongs to the Creator who will grant victory to His Guardian when the time of the unjust has ended and the appointed day has arrived.
Written in Rajab of the eighteenth year of the servant of our Lord and His sovereignty. Completed. Praise belongs to our Lord alone.