The fifth response is to say: One condition of mass transmission is that there must be transmitters whose reports yield certain knowledge at the beginning, at the end, and at the intermediate stages. Before the death of al-Hasan ibn Ali al-Askarī, no one maintained the imamate of this awaited imam. Nor is anyone known, during the time of Ali or the rule of the Umayyads, to have claimed the imamate (1) of the Twelve and of this Qā’im. Those who made such claims asserted only an explicit designation of Ali or of certain individuals after him. As for the claim of an explicit designation of the Twelve and of this Qā’im, no one is known to have asserted it in the early period, let alone transmitted it then.

The sixth response is that there was not a single Rāfidī among the Companions. Anyone who claims that a small number of them were Rāfidah has attributed a falsehood to them. Even so, mass transmission cannot be established through those few, since a small number of people who share a doctrinal position could collude in lying. The Rāfidah consider it possible that the majority of the Companions lied (2). How, then, could they rule out lying on the part of the few who transmitted this explicit designation—if any of them transmitted it at all? If there were no Companions through whom this report was mass-transmitted, then its mass transmission was broken at the very outset.

The seventh response is that the Rāfidah say that the Companions apostatized from Islam by denying the explicit designation, except for a small number (3)—around ten, or fewer or more—such as Ammār, Salmān, Abū Dharr, and al-Miqdād. It is well known that the majority did not transmit this explicit designation, for, according to the Rāfidah, they concealed it. Thus, they cannot attribute its transmission to this