Paimana

Tenth of Muharram, 1448 AH

Of all the men of the House who stood on the plain that afternoon, one came away alive. He was a young man, and sick, too sick to lift a sword, which is the only reason he was among the tents and not in the field. When the killing was done and the soldiers came through the camp with their knives, someone meant to kill him too, and was talked out of it.[1] So he lived. They put him in chains and marched him to Kūfa and then to Damascus, paraded him with the women and the severed heads, set him before the men who had ordered the thing, and at last let him go home to Medina, where he lived something like thirty-five years more. In those years the risings came. Men rose in his father’s name to avenge his father’s blood: the penitents first, and then al-Mukhtār, who did take Kūfa, and did kill some of the killers. And the survivor, no longer young, the one man alive with the best claim of anyone to call for the sword, did not call for it. He stayed in Medina and he prayed.

There is something here that ought to give us pause. The book he left behind, a book of prayers, the tradition came to rank just below the Qurʾān itself: the Sister of the Qurʾān, they called it, the Psalms of the House of Muḥammad.[2] The father’s act was the sword, and the father is the heart of everything these essays have been circling. The son’s act was supplication, and his supplication the tradition set on a shelf just under scripture. So the question is a hard one. Why is the survivor’s register prayer? And there is a graver form of it, which I want to keep in view the whole way and not flinch from at the end. Is this the tradition doing the oldest and most suspect thing a religion can do, which is to take a man with a boot on his neck and teach him to pray instead of to fight?

I shall argue that the turn from blood to supplication is something other than a retreat, and stranger than it looks. It is the discovery of the form that action takes when power is gone. What holds it together has not, I think, been put quite this way before: a single doctrine, peculiar to this tradition, that the series has been walking around for six essays without naming. I shall come at it slowly, because the doctrine does its work only once the problem is set out properly, and the problem is an old and a hard one.

The problem is this. Suppose you ask God for something: for rain, for a sick child to live, for the lash to be lifted. He knows already what you need; He knew it before you asked. He is wholly good, and so wants what is best for you. And He does not change. Then your asking falls into a trap with two jaws. Either the thing you ask is the best thing, in which case He was going to bring it about in any case, and your asking adds nothing; or it is not the best thing, in which case He will not bring it about, and your asking is worse than nothing, an attempt to talk Him out of the good.[3] Petition looks either idle or impertinent. This is not a modern worry got up to embarrass the pious. It is as old as reflective prayer, and the surprising thing is that the survivor’s own book states it, out loud, in the middle of a prostration: were it not that He had commanded the asking, the prayer says, I should have held Him too exalted to be asked. The tradition that produced the Ṣaḥīfa looks the paradox straight in the face.

And the paradox falls heaviest on this tradition of all. A theology that lets God change His mind, or learn, or be moved from outside, has an easy way out: prayer informs Him, or sways Him, and the trap never shuts. The Imami tradition allows none of that. Its God is the necessary being of the philosophers, who knows all things from eternity and is moved by nothing; and for such a God the jaws close tight. So that if anyone has the right to read prayer as a kind of dignified self-soothing, vivid as a human act and idle as a request, it is this tradition above any other. And this tradition refuses to.

Before I come to the refusal I want to set down the best that has been thought on the other side, because the tradition’s claim shows its strangeness only against it. Faced with the paradox, the most careful religious thinkers have tended to save prayer by lowering what it claims. There is a saying, much repeated, that prayer does not change God but changes the one who prays.[4] On this reading the whole force of petition turns inward: I ask for the child to live, and whether or not the child lives, the asking works on me, softens me, brings my will into line with His. The request is at bottom a discipline wearing the language of a request. A second and subtler line keeps the relationship and still lets the outcome go: God, who could give unasked, sometimes waits to be asked, so as not to spoil us or overwhelm us, the way a wise friend will hold back a gift that would crush the friendship if it simply rained down unbidden.[5] Here prayer matters, and is even necessary; but it matters as the upkeep of a bond, and gets no purchase on events. And a third line, the boldest of the three about causation, says that prayer is a cause, but a cause God Himself wrote into the plan from eternity, so that we pray “not that we may change the Divine disposition,” but to obtain by asking what He arranged from the first to give through the asking.[6]

Notice what the three have in common. Each saves the practice by conceding the point that began the trouble. The future stays shut. On the first reading prayer reworks the one who prays; on the second it keeps a friendship in repair; on the third it turns a wheel that was always going to turn just so. On none of them does it alter what the world was otherwise going to contain. For a man who has lost everything and has only the prayer left, this is a cold gift. Pray, these answers tell him; it will do you good, and keep you near to God, and may even be a cog He foreordained. But do not imagine it moves anything. The boot stays on the neck, and the praying is for the sake of the one who prays.

There is a way of making this deflation airtight, and it has to be followed to its end, because the tradition must break through it and not merely round it. Consider what kind of speech-act a request is.[7] When I ask you to shut the window, my asking works as a request only against a background of conditions: that you are able to shut it, that you are not already in the act of shutting it, that it is not somehow obvious you will shut it whatever I say. Strip those away and the words go hollow. To ask a man to do what he is visibly already doing, or what he plainly cannot do, is not to request at all. Set a petition now before the God we have been describing, and each condition fails in turn. He is able to do anything; He needs no telling; and on the closed-future picture He is already going to do whatever is best, regardless of what I say. So the petition, taken as a request, is what a philosopher of language would call defective: it has the form of asking with none of the standing of it.

What follows is elegant, and for the survivor it is devastating. If prayer cannot be a request, it must be something else wearing the mask of one. An avowal, perhaps: a saying-aloud of one’s own creatureliness, of the “I am nothing, and You are all” to which the Ṣaḥīfa returns on every page, joined to an appeal, a turning of the face toward God. On this account, which is the high-water mark of the deflationary reading, prayer is wholly expressive and wholly sincere, and it does nothing at all to the world. It is the previous essay’s performative again, in a new key: an utterance that enacts a relation rather than reporting or altering a fact. And if that is all prayer is, then the survivor in Medina is doing something beautiful and nothing more. He is composing the most exquisite avowal of dependence in the language, and the killers are dying of old age in their beds.

Against the whole of this the Imami sources say something blunt and, on its face, philosophically reckless. They say that prayer works. Not that it works on the one who prays: that it works. Supplication is the weapon of the believer, they have the Imams say; a weapon, an instrument that does something to the world outside the self.[^8] Nothing turns back the decree, runs the most startling of the reports, except supplication. There is a saying in which the descending affliction and the rising prayer meet in the air and grapple, and keep grappling, until the Day of Rising. The vocabulary throughout is one of cause, and of combat. The thing the tradition puts in the survivor’s hands is a weapon.

But now the paradox is back, and angrier than before, for the tradition seems simply to have forgotten it: to be promising, in the teeth of an omniscient and unchanging God, just the grip on events the paradox had proved impossible. Either the sources are naïve, saying a warm thing they have not thought through, or they are standing on something that lets the blunt claim be true. They are standing on something. It has a name, and the name has lain under this whole series like a foundation stone nobody had turned over.

The doctrine is badāʾ, and I have to expound it carefully, for everything turns on getting it right and it is the easiest thing in the world to caricature.[9] Begin with a distinction the tradition draws inside the divine determination itself. On the one side there is what the sources call the umm al-kitāb, the Mother of the Book, also the Guarded Tablet; and this is simply God’s eternal knowledge, in which nothing is erased and nothing revised, in which He never comes to know what a moment before He did not know. Whatever is written there is fixed beyond reach and beyond change. But the tradition reads, alongside this, a second book. The Qurʾān says that God effaces what He wills and confirms, and that with Him is the Mother of the Book; and the tradition takes the effacing and the confirming in full seriousness, as naming a working register of the divine governance, a book of the world’s unfolding that He writes and rewrites. Call it the book of effacement and confirmation. What is entered there is conditional, suspended, answerable to what happens below; and the things that can rewrite it are named, and they are small and homely: an act of kinship that lengthens a life, an alms that turns aside a ruin, a prayer that lifts what was already on its way. Badāʾ is the name for that rewriting. It is the claim that the worldly decree, at the level that touches us, stays open and conditional, a living thing that answers to prayer among the rest.

Three guards keep the doctrine from collapsing into the crude thing its opponents take it for, and the tradition insists on all three. The first: badāʾ is never God’s changing His mind or being corrected by events. Al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765) laid the rule down: nothing ever newly appears to God concerning a thing that was not already in His knowledge.[10] The change is in the manifest book, never in the knowledge behind it; He eternally knew both what the lower book first held and that He would rewrite it, and knew the prayer that would do the rewriting. The second: badāʾ works through causes and not against them. The prayer that turns the decree is written into the order of causes as a cause, just as the kinship-tie and the alms are; nothing here is magic, or override; the world keeps its joints. And the third is a guard about the doctrine’s own weight, and its danger. The Imams prized it astonishingly; they are reported to say that God has been worshipped by nothing so much as by the affirmation of badāʾ. Yet at the same time the tradition’s philosophers, once falsafa had come into it, worked hard to fence it in, holding the rewriting to the lower world of qadar and time and keeping it clear of the fixed and necessary order, because a God of immutable essence sits uneasily beside a decree that bends.[11] That tension is there, and I shall come back to it when I let the objection have its full say. For the moment the point is only that the doctrine is old and central, and says the one thing the deflationary settlement had said could not be said: that the asking lays hold of something open, and changes it.

There is an obvious objection here, and it is a good one, so let me meet it before going on. Did we not just grant that God eternally knew He would rewrite the lower book, and knew the prayer that would do it? Then in what sense is anything altered at all? If from eternity the truth was “the affliction, unless he prays; and he prays; therefore no affliction,” then the affliction was never simply going to happen, the “rewriting” is a manner of speaking, and badāʾ has quietly collapsed back into the third Western answer, prayer as a cause God fixed in the plan from the first. The decree only looks open. Aquinas (d. 1274) could have said as much.

I do not think it does collapse, and the reason has come up before in these essays. The Imami claim is not merely that prayer is a cause within a fixed plan; it is that the lower decree has two layers, of which the lower is open to change: there is a “this was coming,” entered in the book of effacement, which the prayer rubs out, against a fixed knowledge that this is how it would go. On Aquinas there is one plan, sealed, and prayer a settled link inside it that overturns nothing. On this picture there are two books, and the lower is written in something that erases, while the upper, God’s knowledge that He would so erase, does not. Now, whether that difference is a difference in the world or only in the way we talk is a hard question, and an honest one. But it is the same question the first essay had to answer about a different pair. There the worry was how an act can be free if God has known from eternity that it will be done, and the answer was that foreknowledge of a contingent act does not reach back and make it necessary. Being known and being fixed are two things.[12] Here the worry is how a decree can be open if God has known from eternity how it will be rewritten, and the answer has the same shape: being foreknown does not make the lower book unconditional, any more than being foreknown makes a free act unfree. Al-Ṣādiq’s rule is the badāʾ-shaped twin of the foreknowledge principle: the insistence that God’s knowing the outcome leaves it as conditional, and as open to decision, as it was before. So the paradox of the opening comes apart in the hand. What is asked stood open at the level that answers to asking, so the asking was never idle; and to ask is only to supply the named condition on which the unsealed decree turns, so it was never impertinence either. The survivor’s weapon is a weapon after all.

And now the move this whole series has been bending toward, which I can at last make because the doctrine is on the table. The same book of effacement and confirmation that makes the survivor’s prayer a cause in the world is the book in which the end of the story is written, and it is written there in pencil. The tradition divides the signs that herald the rising of the Qāʾim into two kinds: the inevitable, which will come however things go, and the suspended, which are conditional and may be effaced or confirmed just as a decreed affliction may.[13] The hour of the rising is not a fixed date ticking toward us; it is mawqūf, held and conditional, which is why the tradition forbids the setting of a date for it and forbids the impatience that would hurry it. And when the sources want to explain why a thing that seemed appointed for a time was then put off, they reach for the word itself: badā lillāh, it was rewritten. The deferral of the end and the answering of a prayer are governed by one and the same doctrine.

I want to be plain about how much this says, because the essay rests its whole weight here. It is not that the open decree and the open hour are two open futures that happen to rhyme. They are one open future, held open by one doctrine. The unavenged blood of the previous essay, the part of Karbalāʾ that has not yet stopped happening, the wound left for the Qāʾim to close, waits in the form that supplication addresses. The thing the mourner cries out for and the thing the end will bring are entries in the same conditional book. So that in this tradition, and I think perhaps uniquely in it, the metaphysics of petition and the metaphysics of eschatological hope are one and the same, seen from the near end and from the far. To pray is to write in the book the Qāʾim’s hour is written in.

Lay the survivor’s life against this and it stops looking like surrender. Read politically, the fifth essay argued, his father’s rising was a refusal, the withholding of legitimacy from an illegitimate power. The son carries the refusal further than the father could, since he refuses both the sword and the throne, and refuses them across thirty-five years while men beg him to lift either. On the closed-future picture this is mere quietism, the oppressed counselled to sit still. But prayer, in the tradition we have now reconstructed, is the one move left to a man who has put down power and still means to act. The appeal goes over the head of the one who holds power, to the only court that sits above the tyrant, the God the Ṣaḥīfa names as the near one to the wronged and the far one from the wrongdoer.[14] A stripped man with no army has one act, and only one, that needs no army: he can lodge his cause where no army can reach to suppress it. The fifth essay called this authority without power, and could only gesture at how authority without power might be more than a posture. Here is how. It is more than a posture because the court it appeals to keeps a book the appeal can change. The survivor’s prayer is politics carried on by the one instrument a man keeps after everything else has been taken; and because the decree is open, it is an instrument that works.

Take it down now to the single soul, which is where the whole thing finally rests. Strip a person of every outward means: his sword, his freedom, his people, his body’s strength, any road by which force might change his lot. What is left to him that still counts as doing, and not merely as undergoing? On the deflationary settlement, nothing: prayer would be a way of bearing what cannot be changed, a discipline of endurance, no more. But under the open decree, prayer is the one act that needs no outward means and still reaches the world; it is agency boiled down to its last essential, and still, at the bottom, agency. This is why the survivor’s register is prayer, and the reason owes nothing to sentiment. His father’s sword was not wrong, and the series has spent five essays refusing to call it wrong. But for him, sick among the captives with the rising already gone to ash, the sword was impossible, and prayer is what action becomes when every other shape of action has been stripped away.

There is a tie here to the first essay that I do not want to let pass, because it closes a circle. That essay turned on the act of a man who could “do no other,” whose freedom and whose necessity were, strangely, the same thing. The survivor is the mirror of that figure and its completion. His necessity is of a different kind from the saint’s inward necessity, the will so formed that it cannot swerve; it is the outward necessity of sheer powerlessness, the iron fact that nothing else is open to him. And inside that iron fact the prayer is the free act that remains[15], the one place where, hemmed in on every outer side, a man still moves. And it is more than agency. The third essay called prayer presence, the standing-before, the trembling that the sources record of this man, who shook when he rose to pray and, asked why, said: do you know before whom I am about to stand. So the act that is most efficacious for the powerless is also the most intimate. In the one motion the stripped man both does the only thing left to do and stands in the nearest possible nearness. Agency and presence are the same act, seen from two sides.

Let me gather the three and say the whole thing once, plainly. The openness of the decree makes the prayer a cause; the openness of the hour makes the hope a live expectation; and the openness of the future before the powerless man makes his one available act a deed. These three are faces of a single claim about how the world is built: that the future, at the level where it touches us, is unwritten, and can be reached by the one act available even to a man who has nothing. The series has been describing this open future the whole way along, from different doors: the contingency of the act and the will, in the first essay; the unforced assent that testimony asks of us, in the fourth; the unfinished and still-unavenged event, in the sixth. The doctrine the finale adds is the one that keeps the future open, and the doctrine which makes prayer a deed is, to the letter, the doctrine which keeps the hour to come. Petitionary efficacy, the deferral of the end, the agency of the powerless: one doctrine, three works. That is the joining I have not seen made; and once it is made, it has less the air of a construction than of the plain shape of the thing.

And here the argument takes a turn I had not expected when I set out, the one that tips the whole series onto a different footing. I have been treating the survivor as a special case, a man pressed into the metaphysics of powerlessness by an extremity most of us are spared. But look once more at what the doctrine says, and the extremity dissolves into the common condition. Before the open decree no one holds any power at all. No one can force the hand of the necessary being; the emperor cannot, and the beggar cannot, and the gulf between them, which is the whole of the world, is nothing at all on the plane to which the decree answers. With respect to the one book that finally matters, every person alive stands where the sick man among the captives stood: holding no instrument except the one that needs no strength, and holding that one in full. The survivor is not the exception to the human case. He is the human case, laid bare, because everything inessential had been stripped from him and only the essential thing was left in his hands.

Now lay against this a claim the tradition makes that ought to be impossible, and find that it stands. The tradition holds that the best of all deeds is to wait. Awaiting the relief, intizār al-faraj, it names the most excellent of works, and in more than one report it calls the waiting itself a worship, the first and highest act of the religion.[16] On its face this is a scandal. Waiting is the absence of action, the posture of one who has nothing left to do; to crown it the best of deeds is to set a wreath on emptiness. But we are now in a position to see why the tradition is not being soft. The hour that is waited for is mawqūf, conditional, entered in the book that prayer reaches; and the community is instructed, on the hidden Imam’s own word, to pray without ceasing for the hastening of the advent, so centrally that one report names the single soul kept safe through the whole long occultation as the one granted the grace to make that prayer.[17] The waiting, then, is full: it is the most extended act the tradition knows of, because the prayer folded inside it reaches the largest object there is to reach, the end of the story itself, and bears upon the hour of its coming. To wait, in this tradition, is to act upon the end. That is why it is called the best of deeds: because this patience is a cause, and a cause laid upon the greatest thing a petition could touch.

And the tradition presses on to the conclusion I have been approaching the whole way, and presses without flinching. The one who waits in this manner, it says, is reckoned as though he stood in the Qāʾim’s own camp; indeed as one who drew his sword at the Prophet’s side and was cut down among the martyrs.[18] Read that slowly, for it is the seam where the two halves of the series are sewn shut. The man who lifts no sword is counted among the men who did. The one who only waits is laid in the scale beside the one who bled, and the scale sits level. Which is to say that the tradition has already pronounced, in its own voice and long before this essay, the thing the essay set out to argue: that blood and supplication are one act. The father drew the steel and was killed for it; the son raised his hands and waited; and the tradition weighs the second man’s portion against the first man’s and finds no difference. Supplication is not the diminished thing that is left when the sword is taken away. It is the sword itself, carried by another road into the one country where steel cannot follow.

There is a congruence in this that I want to dwell on. The sixth essay found the mourner inside the founding event rather than before it, made a sharer in Karbalāʾ by the rite that holds it present. This essay finds the same community inside the redeeming event as well, numbered among the companions of an advent not yet arrived, made a sharer in it by the prayer that helps to draw it near. So the community lives in a present that is open at both its ends. Its lament reaches back and takes hold of the wound; its supplication reaches forward and takes hold of the cure; and the single faculty that performs both motions, that touches the founding past and the redeeming future in one act, is prayer. So the mourner is not left stranded between a catastrophe behind and a deliverance ahead, with nothing to do but wait on each end. A hand is laid on both.

Now I owe the objection its full strength, and it has never been more dangerous than at this moment, because the last few paragraphs have forged its perfect weapon and set it in its hand. A friend of the wronged, and it must be a friend, will say that I have now spoken the quiet part aloud. I have taken the man with the lash on his back and told him that his prayer is a kind of action; worse, that his waiting is the best of all actions; worse still, that he is reckoned a martyr though he lifts no sword, and that the longer the boot stays on his neck, the more his endurance is worth. This is not the softening of the opiate. It is the opiate brought to perfection. Marx called religion the sigh of the oppressed creature and the opium of the people;[19] he did not imagine a faith resourceful enough to award the oppressed the rank of the fallen soldier for the act of staying down. Every empire that ever stood should have endowed a chair to teach this doctrine. And the charge saves its heaviest blow for the end: thirteen centuries on, the boot has not lifted. The blood the sixth essay left waiting is waiting still. A theology that names the waiting the best of deeds and never brings the waiting to a close has a word for what it is doing, and the word is not efficacy.

The reply has to take the blow before it returns one, and I would rather it took it squarely. Three things, and the first carries most of the weight, for it turns on what the tradition means by waiting, which is not at all what the objection needs it to mean. The intizār the tradition crowns is active waiting, not the folded hands of a man who has surrendered and dressed the surrender as a virtue: a waiting crowded with work. The one who awaits is required to be reformed before he may claim to await a reformer, to keep the whole of the law in the Imam’s absence, to enjoin the good and forbid the wrong, to hold himself in the readiness of a soldier who expects the order to march at any hour of any night.[20] The reckoning that numbers him with the martyrs is a reckoning for that readiness; it is granted to the man who would have drawn the sword and is denied only the occasion, and it rests on the readiness rather than on the inaction. What the doctrine asks of the one who cannot fight is that he be, in every particular short of the blow itself, a fighter. And yet I have to concede, and the concession is not a small one, that the line is fine, and the tradition does not always keep to it: there is another voice in the same sources that praises the occulted community for holding its hand wholly from the sword, and that voice has been read, and used, in just the way the objection dreads. The frontier between active awaiting and passive submission is narrow, and it has been crossed, and the crossing has served the boot.

The second concession I have already made and shall not withdraw: the entire efficacy rests upon badāʾ, a doctrine I cannot prove and that the tradition’s own philosophers were careful to fence. And the third is the one the doctrine presses on itself, and it is the reason the waiting stays honest and does not become an anaesthetic. The wait is a fact. The hour is not yet, and the boot is still on the neck, and the prayer that hastens the hour has not, in thirteen hundred years, brought it. A doctrine that whispered the wait was nearly over would be the opiate; this one says the reverse, that the wait may be long past any living patience, that no creature may name its end, that the prayer is a cause whose effect is held back for reasons sealed in the book no one reads. The wronged are told their prayer is a sword, and told in the same breath that the battle is not today. Whether they should therefore wait, or rise, the tradition will not say, because it has kept that one knowledge, the knowledge of the hour, for the one who is himself the hour. And so, a last time, I leave the question where every essay in this series has had to leave it: open, and handed on.

So let the six essays come to rest in one figure. The man at prayer in Medina is the willing of the necessary made flesh: the free act inside an iron necessity, the first essay’s paradox walking. His book of supplications is the second essay’s lament, turned at last from the open grave toward God. His trembling as he rises to stand is the third essay’s presence, the witness before the Witnessed. His prayers come down to us by so many hands that no chain need vouch for them, certain in the fourth essay’s way, certain without authentication. His refusal of both sword and throne is the fifth essay’s authority without power, now shown to have teeth because the court he appeals to keeps a book that bends. And the hour he waits for is the sixth essay’s open and unfinished time, the part of Karbalāʾ that has not stopped happening. One doctrine holds all of it: that the future is unwritten, and that the single act left to the powerless can reach it.

And the series began with the other half of this same man. The first essay stood on this very plain and watched his father do the thing he could not avoid and chose without flinching, willing the death he had no power to escape, free in the one place an iron necessity leaves a man free. I called that the willing of the necessary, and when I wrote it I believed it named the father’s sword. I see now that it names the son’s prayer no less well, and perhaps better. The father met a necessity that came from without, the army drawn up on the plain, and answered it with the act the moment left open to him, which was the sword. The son met a necessity deeper than any army, the bare fact of his own powerlessness, the shutting of every road but one, and answered it with the act that that moment left open to him, which was prayer. Two men, two necessities, one will, and one deed wearing two faces. From blood to supplication was never a passage from a thing to its opposite. It was the single human act, the willing of what cannot be helped, finding the last form still open to it once the last of its power was gone.

So I shall end where the marks are. He outlived the men who killed his house by thirty-five years and lifted no hand against them, and what those years wrote into his body were not the scars of any sword but the signs of the standing, the skin of his forehead and his palms gone hard as a camel’s knees from being set, ten thousand times, against the ground.[21] He had no army, no throne, no hour he was given leave to name. He had the one thing that can be taken from no one, the thing the beggar holds as wholly as the king, and he spent it, every day, on the largest matter there is. That is the whole of these seven essays gathered into a single figure at prayer in a bare room: not broken, and not waiting in the small and cowardly sense of the word, but acting, in the last and quietest form that action can take, upon a future that is unsettled, and his to touch. The sword he was refused and the supplication he was granted prove, in the end, to have been one sword. He is holding it still. And so, if the doctrine is true, are we.

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[^1]: ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn, called Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn (“the ornament of the worshippers”) and al-Sajjād (“the much-prostrating”), d. 95/713, the fourth of the Imams. He was present at Karbalāʾ on 10 Muḥarram 61/680 but, disabled by illness, did not fight; the sources have him spared from the post-battle killing at the intercession of his aunt Zaynab, then marched in captivity to Kūfa and Damascus and at length permitted to return to Medina, where he lived in seclusion and held aloof from the Alid risings of the Second Fitna: the penitents (al-Tawwābūn) and the revolt of al-Mukhtār b. Abī ʿUbayd (d. 67/687), whose overtures he is reported to have declined. The standard modern study of the community in these years, and of the genuine uncertainty in the sources over whether the Imam advanced any claim to leadership at all, is Hossein Modarressi, Crisis and Consolidation in the Formative Period of Shīʿite Islam. I stress the contested quiescence at the outset because the essay’s closing refusal, to settle whether waiting is faith or failure, is not a rhetorical evasion but the reflection of a question the tradition itself left open in his lifetime.

[^2]: The Ṣaḥīfa al-Sajjādiyya, “the scripture of al-Sajjād,” is the oldest prayer-manual of the tradition, fifty-four supplications with appended whispered prayers (munājāt), and is ranked, in esteem, immediately after the Qurʾān and the Nahj al-Balāgha; among its honorifics are Zabūr Āl Muḥammad (“the Psalms of the House of Muḥammad”) and Ukht al-Qurʾān (“the Sister of the Qurʾān”). The English version is William C. Chittick’s The Psalms of Islam (1988), whose introduction reads the book as tawḥīd in the devotional register: the bare confession that God is everything and the creature nothing, carried through into the grammar of address. The line I paraphrase two paragraphs on, in which the worshipper says he would have held God too exalted to be petitioned had petition not been commanded, stands in the prostration of one of the supplications, and shows the tradition stating the petitionary paradox in its own liturgy rather than receiving it from outside. Like the maqtal of the fourth essay, the Ṣaḥīfa reaches us by a transmission broad enough that its standing does not hang on any single chain.

[^3]: The argument is put in its sharpest modern form by Eleonore Stump, “Petitionary Prayer,” American Philosophical Quarterly 16 (1979): 81–91, from three premises: divine omniscience, divine goodness, and the human practice of asking God for things, whose joint tension makes petition look either superfluous or improper. The dilemma I give in the text (best, hence already willed; not best, hence refused) is the form the problem takes once one adds divine immutability, and it is for that reason fiercest in a theology of the necessary being, which can avail itself of none of the exits (informing, persuading, moving) that a more anthropomorphic God would allow. A second and distinct version turns on omniscience alone and presses whether one can coherently ask a God who already knows the outcome; I take the immutability version because it is the one the tradition’s own picture of God invites.

[^4]: The formula, that prayer does not change God but changes the one who prays, is regularly given to Kierkegaard (d. 1855), and fairly, as a distillation of his devotional writing, though it circulates as a saying more than as a locatable sentence and should be cited with that caution. What matters here is the type of solution: the inward turn, which secures the reality of prayer by relocating its whole effect into the praying subject. It is the religious counterpart of every deflation that rescues a practice by lowering its claim, and it is the reading the Imami sources most flatly reject.

[^5]: Stump’s own resolution (same paper) is not the inward turn but the safeguarding of a relationship: an omnipotent benefactor who simply supplied every good unasked would overwhelm or spoil the finite friend, flattening the friendship into mere dependence, and petition preserves the asymmetry at a humane distance. God sometimes waits to be asked. Michael Murray and Kurt Meyers later argued, in a kindred spirit, that the requirement of asking guards against a corrosive sense of self-sufficiency. These are the best of the relationship-preserving answers, and they are genuinely deep; my point is only that, like the inward turn and like Aquinas’s providential cause, they leave the efficacy of petition over events exactly where the paradox left it: unclaimed.

[^6]: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II–II q. 83 a. 2: divine providence ordains not only which effects shall come to be but from which causes and in what order, and human acts, prayer among them, are such causes; “we pray not that we may change the Divine disposition, but that we may impetrate that which God has disposed to be fulfilled by our prayers,” citing Gregory the Great, that by asking men may deserve to receive what God from eternity disposed to give. This is the strongest of the three Western answers on the question of causation, since it makes prayer genuinely a cause and not merely a discipline. But, as the Stanford Encyclopedia‘s article on petitionary prayer observes of just this passage, the move “seems to deny that petitionary prayers are effective” in the robust sense, because the plan it writes prayer into is itself fixed: the prayer turns a wheel, but the wheel’s turning was sealed from eternity. It is exactly this sealing that badāʾ refuses, and the refusal is the whole distance between this essay and Aquinas.

[^7]: The apparatus is John Searle’s, Speech Acts (1969), building on J. L. Austin (d. 1960): a directive such as a request carries preparatory conditions, that the hearer is able to perform the act and that it is not obvious he would perform it anyway, without which the illocution misfires. Setting a petition before an omniscient, omnipotent, and provident God strips those conditions away, yielding what one may call a defective directive, and pushing the analysis toward non-requestive readings: prayer as avowal (an expression of the petitioner’s standing) and appeal rather than genuine asking. The application to prayer is my own, though it is in the spirit of accounts that read liturgical language as performative rather than constative, and it connects directly to the sixth essay’s treatment of “every day is ʿĀshūrāʾ” as an Austinian performative. I press it here because it is the most rigorous form of the deflation, the version that grants prayer everything except a hold on the world, and so the version badāʾ must answer.

[^8]: The phrases are from the devotional corpus: al-duʿāʾ silāḥ al-muʾmin, “supplication is the weapon of the believer” (in the Shīʿī collection al-Kāfī of al-Kulaynī, and widely in the Sunni books); lā yaruddu al-qaḍāʾ illā al-duʿāʾ, “nothing turns back the decree but supplication” (al-Tirmidhī, Kitāb al-Qadar, no. 2139, from Salmān, graded ḥasan, with Shīʿī parallels); and the image of the supplication that meets the descending affliction and wrestles it “until the Day of Resurrection” (al-Ḥākim, al-Ṭabarānī). Note that even the canonical commentary tradition, Sunnī included, already concedes the kernel the Imami doctrine will systematize: that the qadar prayer can avert must be a changeable rather than a fixed qadar. The vocabulary is deliberately one of causation and even of combat, not of inward effect, which is why the deflationary readings cannot accommodate it. Al-duʿāʾ huwa al-ʿibāda, “supplication is worship itself” (al-Tirmidhī; Qurʾān 40:60), sets petition at the center of the religion rather than at its anxious margin.

[^9]: Badāʾ (lit. “appearance, emergence”) is upheld as doctrine in Imami Shiʿism and rejected by most other schools. Its scriptural anchor is Qurʾān 13:39, “God effaces what He wills and confirms, and with Him is the Mother of the Book” (yamḥū Allāhu mā yashāʾu wa-yuthbitu wa-ʿindahu umm al-kitāb), read together with 6:2 on the two terms, the ordained and the deferred. The tradition distinguishes the umm al-kitāb / al-lawḥ al-maḥfūẓ, God’s unchanging knowledge, the “reserved” determination, from the mutable register, the kitāb al-maḥw wa-l-ithbāt or “book of creation” (kitāb al-takwīn), in which entries are conditional and are altered by such causes as supplication, almsgiving, kinship, and repentance. The locus classicus is the bāb al-badāʾ of al-Kulaynī’s (d. 329/941) al-Kāfī; it is treated by Ibn Bābawayh (al-Ṣadūq, d. 381/991) in al-Tawḥīd and by al-Mufīd (d. 413/1022). The authoritative survey in a Western language is W. Madelung’s article “Badāʾ” in the Encyclopaedia Iranica. The doctrine must not be confused with the human badāʾ of “changing one’s mind,” which the same authorities are at pains to deny of God.

[^10]: The decisive formula is al-Ṣādiq’s (Jaʿfar b. Muḥammad, d. 148/765): mā badā lillāhi fī shayʾin illā kāna fī ʿilmihi qabla an yabdū lah, “nothing ever appears to God concerning a thing that was not in His knowledge before it appeared.” The change, that is, is in the manifest decree alone; the knowledge behind it is eternal and entire. The same sources transmit the Imams’ striking exaltation of the doctrine: that “God has been worshipped by nothing like the affirmation of badāʾ,” and (from al-Riḍā) that no prophet was sent but with the affirmation of badāʾ and the prohibition of wine. And they ground it in concrete instances, above all al-Ṣādiq’s word at the death of his son Ismāʿīl, who had been expected to succeed him: that God changed nothing in His decree as He did in the matter of Ismāʿīl. Historically the term enters Shiʿism early and controversially: it is first reported of al-Mukhtār, who explained a failed prediction by saying badā li-rabbikum, and passed from the Kaysāniyya into nascent Imami thought. That genealogy is part of why the doctrine has always carried an edge.

[^11]: The tension is with the philosophers’ God of immutable essence, and it is felt most acutely by the Imami theologians who had absorbed Muʿtazilī and then Avicennan commitments. Mīr Dāmād (d. 1040/1631) and his pupil Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1050/1641) accordingly confined badāʾ to the lower reaches of the determination, to qadar and the world of generation and time (zamān), and kept it clear of the fixed and necessary order (qaḍāʾ) and of the eternal. This maps onto the registers of duration the sixth essay borrowed from the same school: badāʾ belongs to zamān and the conditional, never to sarmad and the abiding. I note the confinement honestly because it is a real constraint on the boldness I am claiming: the tradition’s own metaphysicians did not let the decree bend all the way down, and an objector is entitled to press the point, which, in the section on the objection, I let him do.

[^12]: This is the cross-tie to the first essay. The worry that God’s eternal knowledge of how the lower book will be rewritten makes the rewriting merely notional is structurally identical to the worry that God’s eternal foreknowledge of a free act makes the act necessary; and the answer is the same answer: that being foreknown and being fixed are distinct, that knowledge of a contingent outcome leaves it contingent. The contemporary literature on the first problem (Zagzebski, for instance, on foreknowledge and freedom) and the classical Imami insistence, in al-Ṣādiq’s formula, that foreknowledge does not cancel the conditionality of the lower decree, are doing the same work in two registers. What makes badāʾ bolder than Aquinas is precisely that it locates a genuinely conditional, genuinely rewritable layer in the decree, rather than a single sealed plan; the “written in pencil” image is meant to mark that, and not to smuggle in a God who erases because He has learned something.

[^13]: On the conditional timing of the end: the tradition divides the signs of the ẓuhūr into the maḥtūm (inevitable) and the mawqūf or non-maḥtūm (suspended, alterable), and subjects the latter to the same effacement-and-confirmation that governs the answer to prayer; hence the prohibition of tawqīt (fixing a date) and of istiʿjāl (hastening). Madelung notes the link in as many words: on this basis “Imami doctrine holds some of the signs announcing the advent of the Mahdī to be inevitable and others as subject to cancellation by God,” through the very book of deletion and confirmation that responds to prayers, while what is in the umm al-kitāb can never change, and on laylat al-qadr the Imam is annually informed of what, having been conditional, has now been made definite for the coming year (Qurʾān 97; 44:4, “therein every wise matter is made distinct”). The early monographs are the Kitāb al-Ghayba of al-Nuʿmānī and of al-Ṭūsī. The reports that explain a deferred appointment with the words badā lillāh are the textual warrant for the identification I press: that the hour and the petition answer to one doctrine.

[^14]: The political reading continues the fifth essay, which used Arendt’s (d. 1975) distinction between authority and power to read Ḥusayn’s rising as a refusal of legitimacy rather than a bid for the state, dīn without dawla. Prayer extends the figure: it is the exercise of authority by one who has renounced power, an appeal lodged with a court above the holder of power. The Ṣaḥīfa‘s own naming of God as qarīb (near) to the wronged and baʿīd (far) from the wrongdoer gives the image its juridical edge: the wronged man, denied every earthly tribunal, enters his plea in the one court the tyrant does not control. That the fifth essay could only assert authority-without-power as a posture, while the present essay can ground its efficacy in the open decree, is one of the joins the finale is meant to make.

[^15]: There is an internal tension the tradition itself must hold: riḍā bi-l-qaḍāʾ, contentment with the decree, set beside a petition meant to change it. The two-tiered decree resolves it without strain: one submits, in riḍā, to the umm al-kitāb, the fixed and unknowable order, while petitioning the mutable book that God has expressly opened to petition. This is the same structure the first essay found in the willing of the necessary: freedom and acceptance are not rivals but layers, the free act living inside the necessity rather than against it. The Ṣaḥīfa enacts the holding-together on nearly every page, submitting and asking in a single breath.

[^16]: The traditions on the excellence of intizār al-faraj, awaiting the relief, are numerous; al-Majlisī gathers them in Biḥār al-Anwār (vol. 52, the chapter on the merit of awaiting), some eighty in number, which class it as the most excellent (afḍal) of works and, in more than one wording, as worship outright. The Prophet is reported to have said that the best of the deeds of his community is the awaiting of the relief, and a widely cited report has it that awaiting the relief is itself worship (intizār al-faraj ʿibāda). The point that the merit is highest precisely under an unjust order, when the believer “moves neither tongue nor hand nor sword” and yet holds firm, comes from a long tradition of al-Ṣādiq’s in Ibn Bābawayh’s Kamāl al-Dīn; it is the same source that grounds the superiority of the worshipper of the occultation over the companion of the advent. The tension between this quietist note and the activist sense of intizār is real and runs through the literature.

[^17]: The hidden Imam is held to have directed his followers to pray frequently for the hastening of his advent (al-duʿāʾ bi-taʿjīl al-faraj); the best-known such prayer, the Duʿāʾ al-Faraj beginning Ilāhī ʿaẓuma l-balāʾ (“My God, the affliction has grown great”), is attributed to him and preserved in al-Kafʿamī’s al-Balad al-Amīn and al-Miṣbāḥ, and in the modern manuals in al-Qummī’s Mafātīḥ al-Jinān. The striking report that the one soul saved from destruction through the long occultation is precisely the one “granted the divine enabling (tawfīq) to supplicate for the hastening of his advent” is from al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī (in al-Ṣadūq’s Kamāl al-Dīn). That the community is told to pray for the timing of the end is the practical proof that the timing is held to be the kind of thing prayer bears upon, which is to say mawqūf, conditional, the register set out above in connection with the signs of the advent.

[^18]: The reckoning of the awaiter with the martyrs is explicit and strong. A tradition of al-Ṣādiq in al-Nuʿmānī’s Kitāb al-Ghayba (and in al-Majlisī, Biḥār vol. 52) has it that one who dies awaiting this affair is as one who is with the Qāʾim in his tent (fisṭāṭ); other wordings sharpen the image to one who fought at the Prophet’s side with his sword, and to one struck down as a martyr beside him. The escalation is deliberate, and it is the doctrinal warrant for the identity I am pressing: the tradition itself measures the reward of the one who waits against the reward of the one who fights and dies, and finds them equal. I take the equality of reward to express an equality of act, the very thing the essay argues, though that last step, from desert to act, is mine.

[^19]: The charge is Marx’s (d. 1883), and deserves its full text and not only the slogan: religion is “the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world … the opium of the people.” The internal Shīʿī form of the dispute is sharper still, since the tradition carries both a quietist current and a revolutionary one: the “red Shiʿism” of ʿAlī Sharīʿatī and the activist reading that underwrote the doctrine the fifth essay treated as a re-fusion of dīn and dawla, against the long quietism that essay took to be the tradition’s deeper current. My reply concedes that the doctrine can be, and has been, turned to the tyrant’s use, and that its efficacy rests on a contested metaphysics; what it refuses is to settle the wait-or-rise question, on the ground that the tradition itself defers that question to the Qāʾim, and that the survivor’s own lifetime, in which whether the Imam should rise or wait was genuinely unsettled, models the deferral rather than resolving it.

[^20]: That the awaiting is active is as firmly attested as that it is meritorious. The same Imams who praise intizār lay heavy duties on the one who awaits: al-Ṣādiq requires that he perform his deeds with waraʿ and the finest conduct before he may be counted a true awaiter, and elsewhere that the one who knows the Imam of his age is the one who, knowing what the Imam expects of him, holds himself in readiness and in reform. Later writers (Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Ṣadr’s al-Mahdī is a clear modern statement) draw out that intizār, far from passivity, is a discipline of self-correction and of enjoining the good, a being-prepared for an advent one labours to deserve. This is the strand that defeats the simplest form of the quietism charge; it does not, as the text concedes, erase the rival strand that counsels the stilled hand.

[^21]: The calluses are the point of his other epithet, Dhū al-Thafanāt, “he of the calluses”: the sources report that the places of prostration, forehead, palms, knees, had hardened like a camel’s knees from the length and the frequency of his prayer, and that he prayed a thousand rakʿas in a day. Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih preserves the report that he trembled as he rose to pray and, asked why, answered: “Do you know before whom I mean to stand?” I gather these not for pathos but because they make the argument visible in a body: agency and presence, the two sides of the one act, worn into the skin of the man who survived.