I put my trust in our Lord al-Ḥākim alone, and seek approach to Him through His servant, the Qāʾim of Truth.
Those who have stayed behind from truth claim descent from nine and a half of the tribes of the Children of Israel: the houses of Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Ephraim, Naphtali, Reuben, Gad, Benjamin, Manasseh, and half the house of Samūʾīl. They have turned from the certain unity of the Creator. The other two and a half tribes, the abābīl birds, are innocent of denial, covenant-breaking, alteration, and substitution. They stand ready against tyrannical peoples who doubt, associate others with God, or reject the Creator, as foretold in the true Scriptures and through the proofs of interpretation.
The Scripture says to the descendants addressed after Pharaoh: “Dwell in the land, and when the promise of the last time comes, We shall bring you together in a company.” It is also said, “We have sent you as a bearer of good tidings and a warner.” These sayings concern the people who followed and obeyed, who were rescued from their enemies and led across the waters. Those who deserted or opposed them were left in humiliation and need until the day of resurrection and the destruction of the enemies of truth.
Now then: praise belongs to our Lord al-Ḥākim, exalted beyond the praise of the nations, beyond the expression of tongues, and beyond everything that words can convey of the reality of the guiding Imam. He originated His Guardian, the Qāʾim of Truth, as a veil of majesty and greatness, and assigned him, as the Intellect, the rule and just governance of spiritual substances.
Whoever has the faculty of discrimination should listen with the ear of understanding, whether his customary language is Arabic or Hebrew, put away pride and self-admiration, accept the proofs of truth, and submit to the awaited Guide, who is exalted above error, doubt, and suspicion. This Guide has come to abolish the religious laws that attach created things to the Creator, remove their injuries, and free those bound by them. The weak servant has received his instruction and assistance so that, through reasoned proofs, he may establish an argument against the Jewish religious law and the inventions of those who have abandoned truth.
We must begin with premises of reason and witnesses drawn from religion, premises which minds can recognize and by which the ignorant may benefit when reminded. Jews themselves accept that earlier messengers were sent and that they were necessary up to the coming of Moses. Here is a demonstration founded upon that admission. The reason why Moses and those before him were sent must either still exist in humanity or have disappeared. If it still exists, it cannot be reasonable to deny the necessity of messengers after Moses. If the Jews claim that this reason disappeared with Moses, they must allow the very argument that earlier peoples could have raised against Moses himself: those who claimed no further need of a messenger after Noah or Abraham would have been justified in rejecting him. That destroys the grounds on which they themselves accepted Moses.
The cause that requires the sending of messengers is humanity's ignorance of the realities of religion and its denial of the unity of the Creator in every age. Everyone who reasons can see that the founders of religious laws have successively overturned the laws before them. Their adherents had done nothing except practice the duties their former lawgivers had commanded, yet the new system treated their practices as obsolete and even permitted their enemies to attack them. What justice is there in condemning people for obeying one set of bodily obligations when a later system prescribes another? The true spiritual meanings of tawḥīd have remained beyond the understanding of these founders and their followers.
The Scripture says: “He taught the human being what he did not know,” and “God—there is no god but He, the Living, the Self-subsisting; neither slumber nor sleep overtakes Him.” These sayings point toward the Creator's manifestation in the visible conditions and forms of humankind, although in His reality He transcends every limit. The bodily lawgivers have denied this indication of the Worshipped One's existence. The just Imam, Qāʾim of the Religion, must therefore terminate the exhausted religious laws and publicly proclaim the unity which the preceding lawgivers could not make manifest.
One of them had been commanded: “Messenger, deliver what has been sent down to you from your Lord. If you do not, you have not delivered His message; God will protect you against the people.” Yet he did not deliver the reality entrusted to him, but obscured its indications through the outward law. Others followed the same path and fell short of obedience to the command of the Creator.
Consider the Torah's commandments. “I am the Lord who brought you out of the place of slavery; you shall acknowledge no other god beside Me. Honor My name and hold Me one.” The Jews understand this as a merely geographic departure from Egypt, whereas the real exodus signifies release from ignorance and the approaching Call in the lands of Syria, when the Messiah would summon people to recognize the living Creator. Instead of acknowledging the promised meaning of existence and divine unity, the Jews rejected the one who came in the name of the Holy Spirit and denied his signs. They then appealed to an alleged permanent prohibition on any other religious law after Moses. But that would make their own unchanging tradition superior to every future manifestation of the Creator's command.
Every legislator and his law are originated things: Moses was a created being; the law he instituted was created; and the people upon whom he imposed it were created. A rational person knows that the founder and maintainer of a law is greater than the law itself. A law has no independent existence or agency; it depends upon a person who establishes and applies it. If the founder can disappear while the law remains only as a custom, the law can also be abolished or replaced. It is foolish to say to the Worshipped One: “You may impose upon me only what You imposed upon my ancestors, and command me only what You commanded an earlier generation.” That is to dictate terms to the Commander rather than to obey Him.
True obligations are trials through which the Creator tests the acceptance and deeds of His servants. The bodily lawgivers have misled their communities by attaching eternal necessity to changing forms and failing to understand the spiritual realities they conceal. The Creator tests His creatures in every time as He chooses, by manifestation or concealment. His freedom to do so cannot be curtailed by any earlier statute or religion. The one continuing obligation is obedience to the Creator in whatever He commands and prohibits; the commanded servant has no right to dictate to the Commander what kind of command he will accept.
The divine Command remains operative in creation, and it is not fitting that the wise Creator should abolish His own command by requiring disobedience to it. The Command manifests through the Qāʾim of the Age, the living Imam who summons creation to tawḥīd. In every period he is the Creator's proof and the real authority operating in the world. His essence as Commander is disclosed through the one who stands by His command; it is not independently known through a law copied from the past.
The absence of the living guiding Imam would amount to neglect of creation. If creation were truly abandoned for the blink of an eye, its established order would fall away and its inhabitants could not be held to recompense. Yet we know that the Creator's acts include both permanence and dissolution. This world itself changes and will perish: if eternal continuity were necessary for every divine act, no created thing could ever cease. So it is no marvel if a religious law ends or is replaced by another. Even the founders of earlier laws acknowledged replacement when they judged the laws before them to have ended.
You Jews acknowledge that the messenger you await and through whom you hope for deliverance is greater than Moses and Abraham, and that he will bring clear signs. Yet the living Guide has already called humanity to the Creator's unity, established the proofs, and been opposed or denied by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. His argument has been made known; his judgment and recompense will soon be manifest.
Nor does the Torah itself stop with Moses. According to the Jews' own received history, prophets succeeded him one after another: Joshua, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, Daniel, and others, down to Malachi, whom they count among the last prophets. The Scripture requires the recognition of messengers who show signs of the kind through which the earlier mission of Moses was recognized. Such proofs existed before and after him, from Adam through Noah and Abraham and their successors. Moses himself is said to have forewarned his people of the coming Messiah and commanded them to recognize the one who would come. Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel likewise told them to heed those who truly spoke by God's command. Their later denial violated the very tradition on which they relied.
Malachi rebuked them for rebellion, denial, and contempt for the command of God. Their conduct caused the true teaching to be concealed from them while the righteous guides withdrew. To this day they profess to await the deliverer, though their own treatment of the Messiah and his companions prevents them from recognizing the one who has come.
Let us then bring forward the texts of the Torah and its prophets, whose authority you claim and whose indications of those to come after Moses you have ignored. It is written: “The Lord came from Sinai, dawned from Seir, and shone from Paran; He appeared from the height of holiness.” Sinai refers to the place from which Moses made his proclamation; Seir is linked to the place from which the Messiah appeared; Paran is interpreted as the region of Mecca; and the height of holiness points, in this reading, to a later and greater manifestation whose sanctity and radiance surpass those preceding it.
The appearance of the Messiah was also indicated by the mention of Seir. In the region of Seir and al-Sharāt there is a place called Nazareth, from which the designation “Nazarenes” came. The later Nazarenes, however, failed to accept the true purpose of the Messiah's mission and thus opposed him more gravely even than those among the Jews who had already denied him. Their errors have been treated extensively in the preceding epistles against Christian doctrine.
Isaiah says in the name of the Lord: “Behold, I shall create a new heaven and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come into the heart.” He also says: “I am the Lord; that is My name. My glory I do not give to another. The former things have passed away, and I announce new things before they spring forth.” Again: “Do not remember the former things or ponder what is past. Behold, I am doing a new thing; it shall appear among you.” These are prophecies that older religious forms will pass away and that new revelation will be made visible. He faults those who profess allegiance to the prophets while denying the change their words supposedly foretell.
Isaiah foretells roads being opened in the wilderness and rivers passing through places where there were none, so that the chosen people might drink. “The people I formed for Myself will proclaim My praise.” There are also four rivers flowing from the height of holiness toward east and west. These become signs of knowledge flowing from the living Guide, the one who proclaims the Creator's unity in every age, and signs of a final people especially devoted to praising and recognizing Him. To cling to the written Torah as though no further knowledge could arrive would be to reject the very promises contained within it.
Another voice cries from the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord in the desert. Raise the valleys, lower the mountains and hills, straighten what is crooked, make the rough places level, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.” This is taken to predict that the divine Call will arise in places where earlier religious authorities did not expect it. It announces a change of religious leadership and the disclosure of a glory previously concealed.
David likewise says in the Psalms: “The Lord said to my lord: Sit at My right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet.” Here David acknowledged a lord greater than himself. David also commands a new song of praise and speaks of the righteous congregation rejoicing in its Maker, exulting on its beds, glorifying God in its throats, and holding two-edged swords in its hands. Through him, God will take vengeance upon the nation that neither worships Him nor acknowledges His unity.
Another psalm, attributed here to David, speaks of a ruler whose dominion extends from sea to sea, from the rivers to the ends of the earth. Kings bring him tribute and all peoples obey; the mighty bow before him and his enemies lick the dust. Yet he delivers the poor person who cries out, the afflicted without a helper, and shows pity to the weak and needy. Prayer and blessing continue for him, and his name endures. Such a description, surpasses the merits of earlier prophets and belongs to the awaited standing Imam who will judge the nations and avenge the oppressed.
You, O Jews and all people of the religious law, wander blindly in your intoxication, having strayed from what your righteous ancestors awaited. Isaiah’s old warning has proved true: because of your doubt you will not find what you desire or succeed. Isaiah told your ancestors that they would not find the one they awaited, and that through doubt they had lost what was in their hands. He also said to them concerning God: “Those who did not find Me sought Me, and those who did not ask after Me found Me.” He told them that they would not find God because they clung to the old creation, while others would find Him.
Malachi, the last of their prophets, rebuked them before his disappearance for their rebellion, denial of the truth, persistence in what had been forbidden to them, and distortion of the Torah. He said to them: “God commanded me to take a clay vessel, bring the elders of the Children of Israel, break it before them, and tell them: Thus says the Lord: I will break this nation and this city as a clay vessel is broken, never to be mended. Whoever approaches Me with a ram is as though he approached Me with a dog; whoever sacrifices a bull to Me is as though he sacrificed a pig. I have come to detest you and your offerings. If you return to Me, obey My command, follow My path, and keep the covenant of Qubbat al-Zamān, I will grant you forgiveness, accept your repentance, and deliver you from your enemies.”
If you, community of Jews, had returned to the Creator, followed His Guide and His proof, accepted His command, walked the path of truth, kept the covenant He made with you, and submitted to the one to whom you were commanded to submit, He would have granted you forgiveness, accepted your repentance, and delivered you from your enemies. You know that you are under the Creator’s anger until the day of reckoning, subjected to oppression, the payment of tribute, humiliation, and poverty, with no leader to whom you can turn and no minister on whom you can rely in matters of religion or worldly life.
You are humiliated and oppressed in this world, and, because you have opposed His friends in religion, you are under the Creator’s anger and accursed. The proof of His anger is His saying: “Whoever approaches Me with a ram is as though he approached Me with a dog; whoever sacrifices a bull to Me is as though he sacrificed a pig.”
Then He said to you, confirming His displeasure with you: “I will establish a new covenant,” the covenant of Qubbat al-Zamān, unlike the covenant made with your ancestors. You, O Jews, were called to the possessor of the awaited covenant and denied him. He showed himself to you through signs and proofs; you recognized him and rejected him, just as the Christians rejected the Messiah’s testament concerning the covenant, following their ancestors in confusion, unbelief, denial, and disobedience.
You have not reflected on what is recited to you in the last passage at the ninth hour of Great Thursday, which signals the abrogation and alteration of the earlier law. The Master gathered his disciples, whom you, O Jews, and all Christians deny and reject. He told them that his time was near, and that Judas Iscariot would hand him over to your Pharaonic company—that is, the heretical Jews.
This is what has kept you under the wrath of the Lord of the worlds to this day. The Master took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying: “Take this, my body, and eat it.” Then he took a cup, drank, and gave it to them, saying: “Take this, my blood, and drink it.” It is the new covenant over which much blood is shed for the forgiveness of faults and sins.
Then he said to them: “Truly I tell you, I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine from now until the day when I drink it anew in the kingdom of God my Father.” He pointed to this noble time, signifying the appearance of the great news for which the worlds had waited and about which they still differ today.
Now the hearts of the nations have come together in unbelief and alike oppose the people of truth. You, O Jews, and all nations have been shown the proof of the awaited Guardian; you are free to respond, and before long you will see with certainty and regret. Anyone who has achieved his purpose in his craft should cease speaking. I have reached my goal and fulfilled the obligation entrusted to me.
Let this close with praise to the Creator exalted above nonexistence, and thanks to His Guardian, the Guide of the nations.
Completed by the favor of the Guardian of Command.