The Twelver ʾImāmiyyah, in contrast to the rest of the people of the Qiblah, claim that the ʿaql (intellect) establishes that it is required for Allāh to place a ḥujjah (ʾimām or prophet) leading the people at all times. They also say that this person must be infallible, in addition to being the most virtuous, brave, and wise of his time and having full knowledge of the Sharʿ (legislation of the religion). These claimed ʿaqlī arguments primarily address the requirement for Allāh to place a ḥujjah at all times, and the remaining matters of General ʾImāmah closely follow from their conclusions. The main arguments are two:
The Argument from Luṭf: This is the primary argument used by the ʾImāmiyyah, and it says that, since providing the people with a leader is a luṭf, and it is required for Allāh to do actions that are luṭf, then Allāh must therefore provide the people with a leader at all times. The meaning of a luṭf in this context is something that Allāh knows will bring people closer to good deeds and away from bad deeds, more than if that thing were not present, without forcing them or making them do it for the wrong reasons. The presence of a leader is a luṭf because the just leader will do things like punishing crimes, helping the oppressed, and preventing perversions. Acts of luṭf make people’s responsibility for their actions more complete and remove their excuses, so it must be qabīḥ (morally evil/wrong) to not give them luṭf, and thus Allāh must provide them with this luṭf. Since the reason for people requiring a leader is that the people are fallible and susceptible to errors and sins, if the leader himself were fallible, he would also require a leader over him to complete the luṭf, eventually leading to infinite regress. Consequently, the leader must be infallible. It is also qabīḥ to place a less virtuous, knowledgeable, and brave person in a position of leadership over a more suitable person in these respects, indicating that the one who is placed in the position of leadership must be the most virtuous, knowledgeable, and brave of his time.
The Argument from Preservation of the Sharīʿah: This secondary argument used by the Twelvers says that, since the Sharīʿah of our Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم was made to remain until the end of times, Allāh must perfectly preserve it so it is not changed or distorted. For the Sharīʿah to be perfectly preserved, none of it can be lost, and there must be a way to know all of its rulings by certainty, which indicates the need for an infallible to preserve it. For the ʾimām to be able to perfectly preserve the Sharīʿah, he must also have total knowledge of it and its ʾaḥkam (judgments).
The response to these arguments can be summarized as follows:
ʾAhl as-Sunnah do not accept that it is possible for any action to be required for Allāh in the first place, and the belief required here is held exclusively in the modern day by the Twelvers. Even the Zaydīs do not accept the doctrine that this argument requires. Because of this, even if it were accepted that appointing an ʾimām with these traits is an act of luṭf, it is not accepted that it is required for Allāh to do acts of luṭf. This document is not the place for a detailed discussion on this issue, but one simple proof against this belief is the ʾāyah { وَلَوْ شَآءَ اَ۬للَّهُ لَجَعَلَكُمُۥٓ أُمَّةٗ وَٰحِدَةٗ وَلَٰكِنْ يُّضِلُّ مَنْ يَّشَآءُ وَيَهْدِے مَنْ يَّشَآءُۖ وَلَتُسْـَٔلُنَّ عَمَّا كُنتُمْ تَعْمَلُونَۖ } “If Allāh so willed, He would have made all of you a single community, but He lets whom He wills go astray and takes whom He wills to the right path; and surely you will be questioned about what you used to do.” (16:93) Indeed, it is not difficult for anyone to come up with examples of acts of luṭf which Allāh could have done for humans but chose not to. Nonetheless, even if this false premise were granted for the sake of argument, their claims still fail for numerous reasons:
The first and clearest issue is that the ʾImāmah that is affirmed by the Twelvers does not actually entail any luṭf at all. If placing an ʾimām were required for Allāh, then it would be required for the ʾimām to be placed openly such that he can be referred to and benefitted from. The luṭf in question cannot occur when this is not the case, as the ʾimām would then have no way to provide people with the incentives or guidance to help them on the path towards good and away from evil. As for the ʾimāms followed by the Twelvers, they were never in positions of any power to be able to bring people towards good or away from bad, and were even constantly practicing dissimulation and hiding their beliefs according to the Twelvers, whereas their current ʾimām has supposedly been in a state of occultation for over 1000 years, and it is known without any doubt that if such an ʾimām exists, it is impossible to reach him or benefit from him.
The kind of ʾimām that would entail luṭf is not required by Twelvers, and the kind of ʾimām that the Twelvers require does not entail luṭf, rendering the argument void. For that matter, we can only know by induction that not having a just leader normally makes people further from good and closer to bad, but the Twelvers believe that there have always been infallible leaders at all times of history, so this induction could only possibly be comparing situations where the leader is inaccessible to situations where the leader is accessible. Thus, the reasoning of the Twelvers becomes even more self-defeating, as they can only determine that lack of such a leader is a harm by looking at cases where they would believe the leader exists but is hidden, as their current ʾimām is.
The Twelvers attempt to respond to this by claiming that their ʾimāms were pushed into a state of fear by the oppression against them such that they had to hide themselves, and that the sin is therefore on the people for bringing about this situation. This response makes little sense, as the vast majority of people had no role in bringing about such a state, and despite this still have no access to the ʾimām despite their supposed need for him.
Secondly, in the same way that having an infallible ʾimām over people would make them closer to good deeds and further from bad deeds, having infallible judges, armies, and deputies, or having infallible leaders in every region, or having an ʾimām that knows everything that occurs in his domain, would also bring them even closer to good and away from bad. Despite this, the ʾImāmiyyah do not claim requirement any of these things for Allāh. If it is argued that the basic sufficient level of making people able to fulfill what Allāh has obligated on them is achieved through only the ʾimām, or claimed that having infallible judges or armies leads to an unknown harm, then there is nothing preventing these responses from being also said about the Twelvers’ own claim.
Thirdly, for it to even be conceivable that this is such a luṭf that it could become required for Allāh, it would have to be known for certain that it only entails that which will bring the people towards increased good and away from bad, and that it is completely free of any aspects that would do the opposite. We lack any such certain knowledge of this, and it is within the realm of reasonable possibility for a group of people to become more disobedient to Allāh due to the existence of the ʾimām because of their disobedience of the ʾimām, or for people to begin obeying Allāh out of fear of the ruler and not out of intentional obedience to Allāh. Probabilistic assumption in this case is not sufficient, because assumption does not occur for Allāh; rather, such assumption is only sufficient for rulings and judgments relating to humans’ own deeds and obligations, and such assumption cannot inform us that a leader must be placed at all times.
Fourthly, it is possible, and indeed occurs, for periods of time to exist where some or even all moral responsibilities from religious legislations are not present. On the other hand, if the presence of the ʾimām is intended to be a luṭf in things (supposedly) known by the intellect, then his presence would be causing people to enact moral obligations out of fear of him, and not out of intellectual knowledge of their obligation. Due to this, the argument cannot be a proof that there would have to be an ʾimām at all times.
Fifthly, for this luṭf, Allāh must know in advance either that something will prevent the effects of the luṭf from occurring, or that nothing will prevent them. As for the former, if this is the case, then there is no benefit from the luṭf, and no reason why it should be required for Allāh. With respect to the latter, then it has not occurred even according to the Twelvers’ own belief, since they believe their ʾimāms have been in constant states of dissimulation and occultation due to people’s oppression towards them.
As for their second argument, then the perfect preservation of the Sharīʿah could only be achieved by having an infallible ʾimām if that ʾimām can be reached and judgments can be taken from him. We know this is not the case, since the 12th ʾImām has been in Ghaybah (occultation) for over 1000 years, and even the previous ʾimāms were in a constant state of taqiyyah (dissimulation) and obfuscation of their beliefs according to the Twelvers. The transmission of the Sharīʿah from the 12 ʾImāms does not differ in any manner from the transmission directly from the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم, and it remains transmitted by fallible people through largely non-mutawātir chains of narration. Considering this, the infallible ʾImām(s) have not provided any benefit in preservation of the Sharīʿah, let alone kept it perfectly preserved. It is strange to claim that the Sharīʿah has been preserved better under the Twelver belief than the Sunnī belief, when Twelver scholars go as far as saying the differences within their own narrations exceed the differences between the Sunnī madhāhib (schools of jurisprudence)!1
What is even more absurd than this is that Twelver beliefs lead to attacking the transmission of the religion of ʾIslām in its entirety. This is because the Twelvers believe the vast majority of the Ṣaḥābah, and Muslim community as a whole, were upon severe misguidance and distorted the religion to oppress and hide the rights of the ʾImāms of ʾAhl al-Bayt. These are the same people who transmitted the Qurʾān (and the Sunnah), so attacking them necessarily entails doubting the entirety of the transmission of the religion of ʾIslām. Furthermore, Twelvers also claim it is possible for major declarations of the religion to remain hidden and unknown to the vast majority of the Muslims over history, and that it is possible for the entirety of the Muslims to apparently be upon falsehood, thereby making it impossible to know the religion is preserved. Without the aforementioned claims, it is impossible to uphold the Twelver beliefs on ʾImāmah, and these claims necessarily lead to denying the reliability of our knowledge of the preservation of the religion.
Rather than an infallible ʾImām, we say that the Sharīʿah is preserved through tawātur and through ʾijmāʿ, since these are both certain and infallible sources for its transmission. Tawātur and ʾijmāʿ are sufficient for providing us with the fundamental principles of the religion, and demarcate the bounds that we must stay within. As for the non-fundamental branches of the religion, then there is agreement that certain infallible transmission is not necessary for these, but rather, it is allowed to act upon ẓannī (non-definitive) evidences such as the transmission of reliable individuals. The infallibility of the unanimous consensus of the Muslims also entails that the true rulings and judgements can never become lost, and any true ruling in the religion will always remain present and apparent among some group within the ʾUmmah.
After having gone through these ʿaqlī arguments, it is important to understand that the claimed necessity of an explicit designation for the appointment of an ʾimām, according to the Twelver scholars, is only a result of the claim that ʾimām must be infallible. Due to this, there is no need to directly address the requirement of explicit naṣṣ (designation by the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم or a previous ʾimām) for ʾImāmah, as the foundation for it has already been responded to. To make this as clear as possible, we will provide the statements of the scholars of the ʾImāmiyyah confirming it. The other conditions the Twelvers claim for ʾImāmah are also explicitly built on the conclusions of the previously discussed ʿaqlī arguments, as has been mentioned in the explanations of those arguments.
Ash-Shaykh aṭ-Ṭūsī said in al-Iqtiṣād:2 “And he [the ʾimām] must be designated by naṣṣ, due to what we have mentioned regarding the necessity of his infallibility, and since infallibility cannot be perceived by the senses, or by reasoning, or by experience, and nobody knows it except Allāh, it must be the case that He [Allāh] designates him [the ʾimām] by naṣṣ and distinguishes him from others on the tongue of a prophet; because a muʿjizah [miracle] must have basis in a previous naṣṣ; due to the fact that the ʾimām does not know that he is an ʾimām except by the naṣṣ of a prophet, so if a prophet designated him by naṣṣ, or if he himself claimed ʾImāmah, then it is possible for Allāh to manifest a muʿjizah at his hand as a sign, just as we say for Ṣāḥib az-Zamān [the 12th ʾImām] when he appears, so naṣṣ has become the default.”
Ash-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā said in Sharḥ Jumal al-ʿIlm wal-ʿAmal:3 “We have proven that the ʾimām must be infallible, so if this is established then he must be designated through naṣṣ by Allāh on the tongue of his Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) or a muʿjizah [miracle] must appear by his hand as a sign alongside his claim of ʾImāmah, so his ʾImāmah would be known by that. And there is no way of knowing the ʾImāmah of an infallible except through these two ways.”
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