There are five foundational beliefs that underlie the practice of Islam. These are: Tawhid, the oneness of God; Adl, the justice of God; Nubuwwa, prophethood; Imama, leadership; and Qiyama, the Day of Judgement. Every human being possesses the gift of reason and great stress is laid on this within the Shia tradition. Each individual believer is responsible for coming to their own conviction of belief in these five foundations based on the use of their reason. Through the use of reason, human beings can come to an understanding of the will of God; it is sometimes spoken of as “the internal prophet.” Not everyone has the same capacity for rational thought but the Quran commands people to reason, ponder, think and reflect. There is a Hadith Qudsi in which Muhammad is given the following statement from God to convey:
“God rewards and punishes according to their reason,”
which indicates the principle that those who have a higher rational capacity will be expected to demonstrate a higher level of knowledge, piety and obedience. Those with the highest rational capacity have the duty to give guidance to those with less. In our own times, the time of the Hidden Imam, there is no access to his infallible guidance. This means that fallible men and women have to struggle to acquire knowledge and implement it in their lives. These are the scholars of Islam, who have a duty of leadership. Someone who commands the basic sciences of Islamic knowledge after the appropriate period of study will be called a scholar (m. Alim, f. Alimah). Such a person who has the necessary capacity and application will pass through years of higher study and research in a specialised field and potentially become an Ayatollah.
There are several hundreds of these within the community worldwide at the present time. A small group amongst them, those of outstanding piety and wisdom, will be prompted by their peers to accept the burden of becoming a Marja’, this is an ayatollah who is worthy of emulation, sometimes called in English, the Grand Ayatollahs. A Marja’ will give guidance that others may follow and accepts the responsibility to be answerable for that guidance before God. Ordinary Shia men and women have the duty to investigate which Marja they believe to be the most pious and wise in their generation and then to pledge themselves to follow his rulings (taqlid). Just as the Quran, the Prophet and the Imams give guidance to human beings to worship, obey, serve and love God, thus guiding, supplementing and confirming human reason, so the Marja’ will guide, supplement and confirm those with less rational capacity, knowledge and piety in the name of the Hidden Imam until such time as he returns.
Up until the year 941, when the twelfth Imam went into the Greater Occultation, it was possible for people to obtain infallible guidance from him. From that time onwards, all guidance is provisional until such time as it is revised by the scholar who gave it or shown to be surpassed by the scholars of a later generation. The science of intellectual struggling is called in Arabic Ijtihad and the scholar who performs it is a mujtahid. Such scholars must have a comprehensive knowledge of Arabic and be trained in philosophy and logic to be able to weigh arguments. They must have an extensive knowledge of the Quran and the Hadith in the Shia collections, together with the sciences of Quranic interpretation and Hadith criticism.
They must have a high level of knowledge of the work of earlier generations of scholars and the points about which there is broad agreement (ijma). The doctrines and Sharia of Islam were laid down by the infallible Imams but the theory and practice of ijtihad comes later. The Prophet and the Imams knew things with certainty by their God-given knowledge; they did not practise ijtihad. The academic system of ijtihad was developed in structure by great Shia scholars such as Sheikh Al-Mufid (948-1022) and Sheikh Tusi (995-1067) and was further expanded by Allama Al-Hilli (1250-1325). Allama means “the most learned one” and he was the first to bear the title Ayatollah, which means “a sign of God.”
The belief in divine justice also shows the relationship with reason. God is just and never oppressive or tyrannical [Q. 3:182; 41:46; 21:47]. Right and wrong, good and bad are objective realities and open to be accessed by our reason. God is not arbitrary, but acts in a rational way. This emphasis on the justice of God was to counter the common Hanbali view that God’s acts cannot be justified by human reason. In other words, God is not bound to act justly rather God’s acts define what justice is. Shia thought gives a high place to the freedom of the human will without detracting from the ultimate authority of God in all things. Again, this was to counter those Muslims who held that human beings have no free will in their acts and everything is predestined by God. God has taught human beings the standards of justice and God acts according to those standards, therefore God does not make an arbitrary decision to send some people to Paradise and others to Hell but rather such judgements are based on the justice of God.
Shia belief is characterised by love for the Prophet and his Ahlul-Bayt (AS). It is a characteristic of Prophets that they do not ask for any reward for their services [e.g., Noah Q. 26:109, Lot Q. 26:164, and Shu’ayb Q. 26:180]. Muhammad likewise sought no reward except that the Muslims should love his Ahlul-Bayt (AS), not for their own sakes but for the sake of God, whose servants they are [Q. 42:23]. Such love for the Prophet and his family brings a reward to the believer, a growth in knowledge and a deeper love of God [Q. 34:47]. He summarised his closeness to the Ahlul-Bayt (AS) by saying in a Hadith in which they are referred to as ‘you’: “I am at war with those with whom you are at war and at peace with those with whom you are at peace.”
This love for the Ahlul-Bayt (AS) is shown by the Shi’a practice of making visits to pray to God at the shrines that have been erected to mark their burial places (Ziyara). Each year is punctuated with days to remember important events in their lives, such as their births and deaths. This is especially important as the first eleven Imams are all regarded as martyrs. As they were all sinless, they died a death of pure innocence for the sake of God, the truth and their people. In some way they have absorbed some of the suffering due to sinners, so part of the visitation of the grave includes the rite of weeping for their unmerited sufferings. The practices of Islam are built on these foundations of belief and are numbered as ten: Salat, Sawm, Hajj, Zakat, Khums, Jihad, Amr bil Maruf, Nahy Anil Munkar, Tawalla, and Tabarra.
The Prophet was instructed that Muslims should offer the formal prayers (salat) five times each day when he had an audience with God during his Ascent to Heaven (Mi’raj), but the Quran actually speaks of three times at which the prayers should be offered. It is common for Shia Muslims to combine the five prayers into three occasions by praying Fajr between dawn and sunrise, Zuhr and ‘Asr between noon and sunset, and Maghreb and Isha between sunset and late night. A line is included in the Adhan (call to prayer) that was there in the time of the Prophet (PBUH): “hasten to the best of deeds” (Hayya ‘Ala Khayr Al-Amal).
In making the ritual ablutions (wudu), the arms are washed downwards from the elbow to the hand, the hands and face are washed and the uncovered head and feet are wiped with wet hands. Hands remain at the sides of the body during the recitation of the Quran and in the prostration, the forehead rests on a Turba (a piece of sun-dried clay), or a stone, or something else that grew from the earth but cannot be used for food or clothing. This follows the practice of the Prophet and his Companions, who prostrated on the sand. When it was hot, they would take a small portion and cool it in their hands, then build a little pile on which the head could rest in prostration without burning.
Fasting each day (sawm) during the Month of Ramadhan is observed until the redness of the sun disappears from the sky. Quran recitation takes place in groups but the additional night prayers are done privately; there is a custom of doing a thousand additional voluntary night Rakat spread over the whole month. The Hajj will normally include at the end of it a visit to the grave of the Prophet (PBUH) in Medina and to those of the Ahl al-Bayt who are buried in the cemetery of Al-Baqi in that city. Payment of a proportion of one’s wealth for the benefit of others falls into two parts: zakat is paid at the rate of 2.5% per annum on livestock, minerals, gold/silver and crops, where these exceed a certain quantity; and Khums is paid at the rate of 20% per annum on what remains from annual income after household and commercial expenses are deducted. This money is entrusted to the Grand Ayatollahs in the name of the Hidden Imam to be used for education and welfare purposes [Q. 8:41].
The life of each man and woman must be characterised by the struggle in the way of God (Jihad) against one’s own wayward inclinations and weaknesses and, if necessary and called for by legitimate authority, against those who attack the defenceless and threaten the continuation of an Islamic way of life [Q. 2:190]. As the regents of God on earth, all human beings have a responsibility to establish a just and law-abiding society; this is summed up in the phrase “commanding the good and forbidding the evil” [Amr bil Maruf wa Nahy Anil Munkar Q. 3:104]. Love for God, the Prophet (PBUH) and the Ahlul-Bayt (Tawalla) and for those who love them is a required practice and should be the hallmark of the Shia; it follows that they should keep away from those who are ungodly and unjust to the Ahlul-Bayt (AS) and do not show that required love (Tabarra).
Two particular practices of the Shia should be clarified to conclude this section: Muta and Taqiyya. Fixed-term marriage (Muta) is based on the Quran [Q. 4:24] and was practised in the time of the Prophet (PBUH) with his approval. A man and woman freely agree to enter into a marriage contract for a term fixed in advance; it can be any term that is agreeable to both. Any children that come from the marriage are legitimate and inherit from both parents. At the end of the term fixed for the marriage, the woman must observe a waiting period (‘Idda) to ensure paternity of the child should she be pregnant.
As in a permanent marriage, an agreed marriage gift (Mahr) is given by the man to the woman. Classic examples of the practice of Muta are in the case of students who are not in a position to contract a permanent marriage and men working on contracts away from their wives and families. It is a way of making sure that sexual urges have a legitimate outlet so that no-one resorts to fornication. In contemporary western society, where young people often have to seek and come to a decision about marriage partners without the traditional extended family structures for assistance, Muta can be used with mutual consent for “getting to know each other better”; the two people concerned, by mutual agreement, can place limitations on their intimacy during this fixed-term marriage.
There are times when it can be dangerous to confess one’s faith openly; indeed the Shia have faced times when to acknowledge that one was such would have resulted in death or persecution. Under these exceptional circumstances, it is permitted for a Muslim to conceal their faith (Taqiyya) when their life, honour or property is in danger. Such situations were acknowledged by the Quran [Q. 16:106; 3:28; 40:28]. There is a balance between such dissimulation on minor matters for survival in particular circumstances and the fundamental denial of God and Islam; better to face death and martyrdom than to deny such fundamentals.