on the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, as the scholars have explained.

When ‘Abdullāh ibn Saba’, the leader of the Rāfidīs, professed Islam, he sought to corrupt it through his cunning and malice, just as Paul had done to the religion of the Christians. He made a show of religious devotion, then of enjoining right and forbidding wrong, until he worked to foment the unrest against ‘Uthmān and bring about his killing. Then, when he arrived in Kufa, he professed extreme veneration for ‘Alī and asserted his explicit designation, seeking thereby to achieve his aims. News of this reached ‘Alī, who sought to have him killed, so he fled from him to Qarqīsiyā (1). His story is well known and has been related by several scholars.

In any case, anyone with even the slightest knowledge of Islam knows that Rāfidī doctrine contradicts it. This is why the heretics intent on corrupting Islam instructed their followers to profess Shiism and use it as a gateway to achieving their aims, as their leader, the author of “al-Balāgh al-Akbar” and “al-Nāmūs al-A‘zam,” explained.

Judge Abū Bakr ibn al-Tayyib (2) said: “All the Bātiniyyah (esotericists), and every one of them who has written a book or treatise setting out their misleading missionary activity, have agreed that the approach of one who calls others to their religion and their abomination—which is alien to all the religions of the messengers and all revealed laws—is to respond (3) to people according to what becomes clear to him and what he observes of their circumstances