has any benefit come through him; rather, only harm.

Yet they maintain that faith is valid only through belief in him, that no one is a believer unless he believes in him, and that none will enter Paradise except his followers: such ignorant, misguided inhabitants of the mountains and deserts, or those who have gained sway over them through falsehood, such as Ibn al-ʿŪd and others like him. These have recorded in their own handwriting some of the disgraceful things we have related about them, explicitly affirming what we have reported and even more.

Despite this, they declare unbelievers all who believe in Allah’s names and attributes found in the Quran and Sunnah, and all who believe in Allah’s predestination and decree: His perfect power, His all-encompassing will, and that He is the Creator of everything. Most of those they regard as their foremost scholars hold that Abū Bakr, ʿUmar, most of the Emigrants and Helpers, the Prophet’s wives such as ʿĀ’isha and Hafsa, and the other Muslim leaders and the Muslims at large never believed in Allah for even the blink of an eye. This is because, according to them, faith followed by unbelief is invalid from its very inception—a view also held by some Sunni scholars.

Some of them hold that the sexual organ with which the Prophet, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, had intercourse with ʿĀ’isha and Hafsa must be touched by the Fire, so that it may thereby be purified of intercourse with women whom they claim were unbelievers; for they regard intercourse with unbelieving women as forbidden.

Furthermore, they reject the established, mass-transmitted hadiths of the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, recognized as such by the scholars, such as the hadiths recorded by al-Bukhārī and Muslim. They consider the poetry of Rāfida poets such as al-Himyarī, Kūshyār al-Daylamī, and ʿUmāra al-Yamanī to be better