The Excommunication of Religious Opponents in Imamiyya: Analysis and Criticism of Imamiyya’s Views as Regards Excommunication

With the advent of excommunicative movements, especially Wahhabism, and massacre and killing of Muslims by them, other sects are criticizing this movement and excommunication of other Muslims by them. To exonerate themselves from this charge, Wahhabis started to overhang and projected the excommunication to others. The works which have been written in this regard tend to accuse Shia Islam of excommunication by distorting the views of the Shia scholars. One of their works, Shiaa’s Excommunicative Thought: Truth or Lies by Abdul Malik bin Abdul Rahman Al Shafei, accuses Shiaa of excommunication. Do Shiaa’s scholars excommunicate Sunnis? In the above mentioned book, the autor excommunicates Imamis by cutting statements of Shiaa’s scholars. This study tries to analyze the excommunication of religious opponents in Imami by using analytical-descriptive method and also reviews perspective of Shiaa’s scholars historically. With the analysis, it can be said that Imami scholars are divided into three categories in relation to the opposite sentence that mostly refers to Sunni’s works. Most of them believe in Islam of opponents, few of them believe in theological blasphemy of opponents, and only the author of Hadaeq believes in the jurisprudential blasphemy of them; even he doesn’t regard the deprived opponents as kafir. From those scholars who voted to Islam of opponents, some of them explicitly acknowledge this verdict that they are generally late-comers, but this directness is seen in the works of some of the ancients such as Mohaghegh Heli. Those who believe in theological blasphemy of opponents, often specify this blasphemy to the hereafter; so they also verdict on the apparent cleanliness of opponents in the world. Thus, the majority of the Imamiyya scholars regard their opponents as Muslim.