Allah (1), carrying a green sheet on which was inscribed in white: “I have (2) made love for Alī (3) obligatory upon My creation, so convey this to them from Me.”’”

The hadiths (4) to this effect, transmitted through the opponents’ own chains, are too numerous to count. They demonstrate his superiority (5) and his entitlement to the imamate.”

The answer may be given from several angles:

First, he must be required to establish the authenticity of what he has transmitted—but he could never do so (6).

As for his claim, “Ahmad related it,” the response is as follows. First, Ahmad compiled the well-known Musnad and also a famous book entitled The Virtues of the Companions. In the latter, he included hadiths that he did not include in the Musnad because of their weakness, for they were unfit for inclusion there: they were either reports narrated by Successors directly from the Prophet or weak (7) for reasons other than such omission. His son Abd Allāh later made additions to this book. Thereafter, al-Qatī'ī (8)—who transmitted it from Ahmad’s son Abd Allāh—added further narrations from his own teachers. Among these additions are hadiths that the experts unanimously agree are fabricated.

This Rāfidī and other Rāfidī leaders like him are ignorant. They quote from this compilation and imagine that everything narrated by al-Qatī'ī or Abd Allāh was narrated by Ahmad himself (9). They do not distinguish between Ahmad’s teachers and al-Qatī'ī’s teachers. They then suppose that Ahmad