These Rāfidis have made people’s salvation, happiness, and obedience to Allah and His Messenger contingent upon an impossible condition that people cannot fulfill—indeed(1), not one of them can fulfill it. They have told people:
“No one will be saved from Allah’s punishment, attain happiness, or be a believer except through this.”
One of two conclusions therefore necessarily follows: either their claim is false, or Allah has caused His servants to despair of His mercy and made punishment inevitable for all people, Muslims and others alike. On the latter assumption, they would be foremost among the wretched who are punished, for none of them has any means of knowing what this Imam—whom they believe to exist in a state of occultation—commands or forbids, or anything he has said. Rather, what they possess are statements transmitted from Rāfidī shaykhs which they claim were transmitted from the Imams [who preceded this Awaited One] (2). They transmit nothing from the Awaited One himself. Even if it were assumed that one of them transmitted something from him, that person would be known to be lying. Thus, if those statements are sufficient, there is no need for the Awaited One; but if they are insufficient, they have admitted their own wretchedness and punishment, since their happiness depends upon one who issues commands, though they do not know what he has commanded.
I have encountered a number of Rāfidī shaykhs, such as Ibn al-Ūd al-Hillī(3), who say: “If the Imāmīs differ over two positions, the proponent of one being known and the proponent of the other unknown, then the position whose proponent is unknown is the true position that must be followed, because the infallible Awaited One is among that group.”