these Ubaydids, who claim descent from Ismāīl ibn Jafar, would be too obvious to remain hidden from any Muslim. For this reason, all the Muslims—those who are believers—among the Shia sects disavow (1) them. The Zaydīs and Imāmīs declare them unbelievers and disavow them. Only the heretical Ismāīlīs affiliate themselves with them, and among them is unbelief of a kind not found among the Jews and Christians. One example is Ibn al-Sabbāh (2), who introduced (3) the dagger among them.
Worse still were the Qarmatians of Bahrayn, the followers of Abū Saīd al-Jannābī (4). They made no outward profession of Islam whatsoever; rather, they killed the pilgrims and carried off the Black Stone.
In none of these—and other similar—wars and tribulations (5) that occurred in Islam was the fighting actually based on the doctrine of the imamate claimed by the Rāfidīs. Even if mention is made of some rebel in a certain land who calls people to his own cause and has men who fight for him, such people are of the same kind as the mountain dwellers, desert nomads, and inhabitants of small towns among the Rāfidīs. They are a small, suppressed (6) faction amid the Muslim majority, and they have no sword drawn against that majority such that anyone could say:
“The greatest dispute to have arisen within the Umma is the dispute over the imamate,” or, “No sword has ever been drawn in Islam as it has been drawn over the imamate in every age.”