Subtleties and Allusions

1) Khiḍr and Teaching Inner Secrets to Moses

The Glorious God taught the divine names to the perfect human: “And He taught Adam all the names”(186) and the angels too learned the divine names (at the level of information, not teaching) through the perfect human.

What transpires in the universe and humanity is knowledge of the divine names, not knowledge of the absolute essence which is pure infinity and unknowable. Some know the divine names while others do not, and those who know them either know through acquired knowledge (ḥuṣūlī) or through witnessing knowledge (shuhūdī), who are the special ones among God’s saints. Thus the absolute essence of the worshipped is not the object, goal or witnessed by any prophet. One can say three things become known: a. The meanings of these types of names. b. That these names have external instances. c. That external instance is the worshipped; however, direct witnessing of that external instance itself is not within anyone’s capability.

The Glorious God teaches knowledge to His prophets through various ways: through direct teaching of names; sending angels; through His special saints who possess divine knowledge (ladunnī), like the story of Moses and Khiḍr; and sometimes through other means, such as the hoopoe bird’s report that conveyed the situation of Bilqīs and Yemen to Solomon.(187)

Moses was one of the resolute prophets (ulū l-ʿazm) and in knowledge of religious law, more knowledgeable than his community. Khiḍr was also not from the common people, but rather was among the prophets or divine saints whom God had informed of inner knowledge, and He commanded Moses to learn the knowledge of divine authority (wilāya) and inner secrets from him.

2) Teaching and Learning: A Two-Way Command

Moses was commanded by God to learn inner knowledge from Khiḍr, just as God commanded Khiḍr to teach Moses. Therefore, teaching and learning were divine commands for both parties.

If God commanded Moses to learn, He also commanded Khiḍr to teach. The Divine Essence entrusted the responsibility of teaching religious law to Moses and the responsibility of teaching inner knowledge to Khiḍr. Ali (a.s.) said that God made teaching obligatory upon the knowledgeable before making learning obligatory upon the ignorant: “God did not take a covenant from the ignorant to seek knowledge until He took a covenant from the scholars to give knowledge to the ignorant.”(188) Thus, just as learning is obligatory upon the ignorant, teaching is obligatory upon the scholar. Regarding individual and collective obligations, there are several possibilities: sometimes it is an individual obligation upon both parties, sometimes it is a collective obligation upon both, sometimes teaching is an individual obligation while learning is collective, and the fourth possibility is the reverse of the third.

3) Characteristics of the Rightly Guided

The main purpose of teaching and learning—as mentioned—is for humans to achieve guidance (rushd), which in the Qur’an stands in contrast to foolishness (safah). What is meant by guidance is the combination of intellectual understanding and belief; that is, the connection between subject and predicate in the realm of knowledge, and binding the essence of the proposition to the soul in the domain of faith.

The Divine Essence considers guidance to be the sum of both the affirmative and negative attributes of perfect believers, and describes the qualities of the guided ones as follows: They are those for whom God has made faith beloved and has adorned it in their hearts, while making disbelief, corruption, and disobedience hateful in their view; these are the rightly guided ones: “He has endeared faith to you and has made it pleasing in your hearts and has made hateful to you disbelief, defiance and disobedience. Those are the rightly guided.”(189) The phrase “He has endeared faith to you” (Ḥabbaba ilaykum al-īmān) means to be a lover of faith and to be attached to it, not merely considering it an obligation. It should be noted that the negative attributes return to the affirmative attributes, because all three mentioned qualities are deficiencies, and deficiency is a non-existential matter, and the negation of such negative matters, being a negation of a negation, results in affirmation.

4) The Invalidity of Comparing the Events of Ghadīr and Saqīfa to the Story of Moses and Khiḍr

Comparing the event of Ghadīr Khumm and Saqīfat Banī Sāʿida to the story of Khiḍr and Moses is invalid, because the story of Khiḍr and Moses was by divine command and both were righteous; whereas the event of Ghadīr Khumm was clearly guided and purely righteous, while the event of Saqīfa was clearly misguided and purely false. The notion of preferring the less excellent over the more excellent is unfortunately a statement that came from Ibn Abī l-Ḥadīd’s pen: “Praise be to God… who placed the less excellent before the more excellent”.(190) The Divine is wise and never acts except with wisdom, and never prefers falsehood over truth. The argument that perhaps based on expedient duty, the less excellent should be preferred over the more excellent: “expediency required it as a duty”(191) is false, because in the events of Ghadīr and Saqīfa, the issue is about justice and oppression, truth and falsehood; not about who is more or less excellent.