= Minhaj al-Sunnah, vol. 3, pp. 10-11. I say: Zayd b. Ali was one of the leading Imams of the Prophet’s Household who fully shared the creed of the pious predecessors. He is innocent of the unsound doctrines held today by the Zaydi community and of the accusations some historians have leveled against him—namely, Muʿtazili theology and extremist Shiʿism. Professor Sharif al-Shaykh Salih Ahmad al-Khattib has defended him at length in his book Al-Imam Zayd b. Ali al-Muftara ʿAlayh; consult it for further details. (1) Al-Khashabiyya: a group who maintained that weapons must not be borne until the awaited leader appears; they therefore killed only with clubs (wood). They followed al-Mukhtar b. Abi ʿUbayd. See Al-Fasl fi’l-Milal, vol. 5, p. 45; Minhaj al-Sunnah, vol. 1, p. 36; and Al-Nihaya by Ibn al-Athir, vol. 2, p. 86. (2) In manuscript Ṭ: “from.” In manuscript Q: “statement.” (3) “Shiʿa” is a general term for anyone who prefers Ali over the caliphs before him—may Allah be pleased with them—and holds that the imamate must remain among his descendants, and that if it passes to others this occurs either through their injustice or through Ali’s practice of dissimulation. See Al-Milal wa’l-Nihal by al-Shahrastani, vol. 1, p. 145, and Al-Taʿrifat by al-Jurjani, p. 171. Al-Hafiz Ibn Hajar defines tashayyuʿ in Hady al-Sari, p. 646: “Tashayyuʿ is loving Ali and giving him precedence over the Companions. Whoever puts him ahead of Abu Bakr and ʿUmar is extreme in his tashayyuʿ and is called a Rafidi; otherwise he is merely a Shiʿi. If, in addition, he reviles the Companions or openly expresses hatred for them, he is extreme in rejection; and if he believes in their return to this world, he is even more excessive in his extremism.” (4) Absent from manuscript Ṭ.