Day 5

The lesson

1. When the Shia disputed whether God has a body, Sahl ibn Ziyad wrote to him. He forbade going deep into God's essence and wrote: God is One and Unique; begets not, nor was He begotten, and nothing is similar to Him; He is the Creator and not created (al-Kafi).
2. His companions knew him as al-Faqih, the jurist (Jami' al-Maqatil of al-Turayhi); his rulings deal with questions pressing in his time, such as the start of Ramadan and the khums. A long commentary on the Qur'an, among the oldest in Shia exegesis, is attributed to him as Tafsir al-Imam al-Hasan al-Askari, though the attribution is disputed. He stated plainly that the leader of the Zanj revolt was not of the Ahl al-Bayt (Manaqib Ibn Shahrashub).
3. The mother of his son was a bondwoman, Narjis, whom the sources also call Rayhana, Sayqal and Susan (Ithbat al-Wasiyya of al-Mas'udi; al-Ghayba of al-Tusi). According to most Shia sources his only child is Imam al-Mahdi, named Muhammad (Manaqib Ibn Shahrashub); among Sunni scholars, Ibn al-Athir, Ibn al-Sabbagh al-Maliki and al-Shablanji also name Muhammad as his son (al-Kamil fi l-Tarikh; al-Fusul al-Muhimma; Nur al-Absar).

Questions

Next lesson

Questions are written by AI from the lesson’s facts, and each answer was checked against its fact.