Categories of People with Respect to the Obligatory Loyalty and Disavowal

People, in matters of loyalty (walāʾ) and disavowal (barāʾ), fall into three categories:

Category One: Those who are loved with pure, unqualified love, without any element of enmity. They are the sincere believers—the prophets, the ever-truthful, the martyrs, and the righteous—foremost among them the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him), whose love is obligatory above love for one’s own self, parents, and all mankind. After him come his wives, the Mothers of the Believers; his pure household; his noble Companions—especially the Rightly Guided Caliphs, the remaining members of the Ten promised Paradise, the Emigrants, the Helpers, the people of Badr, and the people of the Pledge of Ridwān—then the rest of the Companions altogether, followed by the Successors, the preferred generations, the early scholars of this ummah, and its imams such as the Four Imams.