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Newsletter for April 2012
Orientalists and the Event of Ghadir Khumm
Sayyid Muhammad Rizvi (Published in Ghadir, 1990)
I. Introduction
The 18th of Dhil-Hijjah 1410 AH is to be celebrated in the Shi'i
world as the 1,400th anniversary of the declaration of Ghadir
Khum in which the Prophet said the following about Imam Ali:
'Whomsoever's master (mawla) I am, this Ali is also his
master.' This event is of such a significance to the Shi'as that
no serious scholar of Islam can ignore it. The purpose of this
paper is to study how the event of Ghadir Khum was handled by
the orientalists. By 'orientalists' I mean the western
scholarship of Islam and also those easterners who received
their entire Islamic training under such scholars.
Before proceeding further, a brief narration of the event of
Ghadir Khum would not be out of place. This will be especially
helpful to those who are not familiar with Ghadir Khum. While
returning from his last pilgrimage, Prophet Muhammad, upon whom
be peace, received the following command of Allah:
'O Messenger! Convey what had been revealed to you from your
Lord; if you do not do so, then [it
would be as if] you have not conveyed His message [at
all]. Allah will protect you from the people' (5:67).
Therefore he stopped at Ghadir Khum on Dhil-Hijjah 18, 10 A.H.
to convey the message to the pilgrims before they dispersed. As
it was very hot, a dais shaded with branches was constructed for
him. Then the Prophet gave a long sermon. At one point, he asked
his faithful followers whether he, Muhammad, had more authority
(awla) over the believers than they had over themselves;
the crowd cried out: 'Yes, it is so, O Apostle of Allah!' Then
he took Ali by the hand and declared:
'Whomever's master (mawla) I am, this Ali is also his
master' (Man kuntu mawlahu fa hadha Aliyun mawlahu).
Then the Prophet also announced his impending death and charged
the believers to remain attached to the Qur'an and Ahl al-Bayt.
This summarizes the important parts of the event of Ghadir Khum.
The main body of this paper is divided as follows: Part II is a
brief survey of the approach used by the orientalists in
studying Shi'ism. Part III deals with the approach used to study
Ghadir Khum in particular. Part IV is a critical review of what
M A Shaban has written about the event in his Islamic History
AD 600-750. This will be followed by a conclusion.
II: Shi'ism and the Orientalists
When the Egyptian writer, Muhammad Qutb named his bookIslam:
the Misunderstood Religion, he was politely expressing the
Muslim sentiment about the way the orientalists have treated
Islam and Muslims in general. The word 'misunderstood' implies
that at least a genuine attempt was made to understand Islam.
However, a more blunt criticism of orientalism, shared by the
majority of the Muslims, comes from Edward Said:
'The hardest thing to get most academic experts on Islam to
admit is that what they say and do as scholars is set in a
profoundly, and in some ways an offensively, political context.
Everything about the study of Islam in the contemporary west is
saturated with political importance, but hardly any writers on
Islam, whether expert or general, admit the fact in what they
say. Objectivity is assumed to be inherent in learned discourse
about other societies, despite the long history of political,
moral and religious concern felt in all societies, western or
Islamic, about the alien, the strange and the different. In
Europe, for example, the orientalists have traditionally been
affiliated directly with colonial offices.' [1]
Instead of assuming that objectivity is inherent in learned
discourses, the western scholarship has to realize that
pre-commitment to a political or religious tradition, on a
conscious or subconscious level, can lead to biased judgement.
As Marshall Hodgson writes:
'Bias comes especially in the questions he poses and in the type
of category he uses, where indeed, bias is especially hard to
track down because it is hard to suspect the very terms one
uses, which seem so innocently neutral...' [2]
The Muslim reaction to the image portrayed of them by the
western scholarship is beginning to get its due attention. In
1979 the highly respected orientalist Albert Hourani said:
'The voices of those from the Middle East and North Africa
telling us that they do not recognize themselves in the image we
have formed of them are too numerous and insistent to be
explained in terms of academic rivalry or national pride.' [3]
This was about Islam and Muslims vis-a-vis the
orientalists.
However, when we focus on the study of Shi'ism by the
orientalists, the word 'misunderstood' is not strong enough,
rather it is an understatement. Not only is Shi'ism
misunderstood, it has been ignored, misrepresented and studied
mostly through the heresiographic literature of its opponents.
It seems as if the Shi'as had no scholars and literature of
their own. To borrow an expression from Marx: 'They cannot
represent themselves, they must be represented,' and that also
by their adversaries !
The reason for this state of affairs lies in the paths through
which the western scholars entered the fields of Islamic
studies. Hodgson, in his excellent review of western
scholarship, writes:
'First, there were those who studied the Ottoman empire, which
played so major a role in modern Europe. They came to it usually
in the first instance from the viewpoint of European diplomatic
history. Such scholars tended to see the whole of Islamdom from
the political perspective of Istanbul, the Ottoman capital.
Second, there were those, normally British, who entered Islamic
studies in India so as to master Persian as good civil servants,
or at least they were inspired by Indian interests. For them,
the imperial transition of Delhi tended to be the culmination of
Islamic history. Third, there were the Semitists, often
interested primarily in Hebrew studies, who were lured into
Arabic. For them, headquarters tended to be Cairo, the most
vital of Arabic-using cities in the nineteenth century, though
some turned to Syria or the Maghrib. They were commonly
philogians rather than historians, and they learned to see
Islamic culture through the eyes of the late Egyptian and Syrian
Sunni writers most in vogue in Cairo. Other paths - that of the
Spaniards and some Frenchmen who focused on the Muslims in
Medieval Spain, that of the Russians who focused on the northern
Muslims - were generally less important.' [4]
It is quite obvious that none of these paths would have led
western scholars to the centres of Shi'i learning or literature.
The majority of what they studied about Shi'ism was channeled
through non-Shi'i sources. Hodgson says:
'All paths were at one in paying relatively little attention to
the central areas of the Fertile Crescent and Iran, with their
tendency towards Shi'ism; areas that tended to be most remote
from western penetration.' [5]
And after the First World War, 'the Cairene path to Islamic
studies became the Islamicist's path par excellence, while other
paths to Islamic studies came to be looked on as of more local
relevance.' [6]
Therefore, whenever an orientalist studied Shi'ism through
Uthmaniyyah, Cairene or Indian paths, it was quite natural for
him to be biased against Shi'i Islam.
'The Muslim historians of doctrine [who are mostly Sunni] always
tried to show that all other schools of thought than their own
were not only false but, if possible, less than truly Muslim.
Their works describe innumerable "firqahs" in terms which
readily misled modern scholars into supposing they were
referring to so many "heretical sects". [7]
And so we see that until very recently, western scholars easily
described Sunnism as 'orthodox Islam' and Shi'ism as a
'heretical sect.' After categorizing Shi'ism as a heretical sect
of Islam, it became 'innocently natural' for western scholars to
absorb the Sunni scepticism concerning the early Shi'i
literature. Even the concept of taqiyya was
blown out of proportion and it was assumed that every statement
of a Shi'i scholar had a hidden meaning. And, consequently,
whenever an orientalist found time to study Shi'ism, his
precommitment to the Judeo-Christian tradition of the west was
compounded with the Sunni bias against Shi'ism. One of the best
examples of this compounded bias is found in the way the event
of Ghadir Khum was approached by the orientalists.
III. The Event of Ghadir Khum: From
Oblivion to Recognition
The event of Ghadir Khum is a very good example to trace the
Sunni bias which found its way into the mental state of the
orientalists. Those who are well-versed with the polemic
writings of Sunnis know that whenever the Shi'as present ahadith or
a historical evidence in support of their view, a Sunni
polemicist would respond in the following manner:
Firstly, he will outright deny the existence of any such hadith or
historical event. Secondly, when confronted with hard evidence
from his own sources, he will cast doubt on the
reliability of the transmitters of that hadith or event.
Thirdly, when he is shown that all the transmitters are reliable
by Sunni standards, he will give an interpretation to
the hadith or the event which will be quite different
from that of the Shi'as.
These three levels form the classical response of the Sunni
polemicists in dealing with the arguments of the Shi'as. A
quotation from Rosenthal's translation of Ibn Khaldun's The
Muqaddimah would suffice to prove my point. (Ibn Khaldun is
quoting the following part from Al-Milal wa al-Nihal, a
heresiographic work of Ash-Shahristani.) According to Ibn
Khaldun, the Shi'as believe that:
'Ali is the one whom Muhammad appointed. The (Shi'a) transmit
texts (of traditions) in support of (this belief)...The
authority of the Sunnah and the transmitters of the
religious law do not know these texts (1). Most of them are
suppositions, or (2) some of their transmitters are suspect, or
(3) their (true) interpretation is very different from the
wicked interpretation that (the Shi'a) give to them.' [8]
Interestingly, the event of Ghadir Khum has suffered the same
fate at the hands of the orientalists. With the limited time and
sources available to me at this moment, I was surprised to see
that most works on Islam have ignored the event of Ghadir Khum,
indicating, by its very absence, that the orientalists believed
this event to be 'supposititions' and an invention of the Shi'as.
Margoliouth's Muhammad
& the Rise of Islam (1905),
Brockelmann's History
of the Islamic People (
1939), Arnold and Guillaume's The
Legacy of Islam (1931),
Guillaume'sIslam (1954),
von Grunebaum's Classical
Islam (1963),
Arnold's The Caliphate (1965)
and The Cambridge
History of Islam (1970)
have completely ignored the event of Ghadir Khum. Why did these
and many other western scholars ignore the event of Ghadir Khum?
Since western scholars mostly relied on anti-Shi'i works, they
naturally ignored the event of Ghadir Khum. L. Veccia Vaglieri,
one of the contributors to the second edition of the Encyclopaedia
of Islam (1953),
writes:
'Most of the sources which form the basis of our [orientalists']
knowledge of the life of the Prophet (Ibn Hisham, Al-Tabari, Ibn
Sa'd, etc) pass in silence over Muhammad's stop at Ghadir Khum,
or, if they mention it, say nothing of his discourse (the
writers evidently feared to attract the hostility of the Sunnis,
who were in power, by providing material for the polemic of the
Shi'as who used these words to support their thesis of Ali's
right to the caliphate). Consequently, the western
biographers of Muhammad, whose work is based on these sources,
equally make no reference to what happened at Ghadir Khum.' [9]
Then we come to those few orientalists who mention the hadith or
the event of Ghadir Khum but express their scepticism about its
authenticity - the second stage in the classical response of the
Sunni polemicists.
The first example of such scholars is Ignaz Goldziher, a highly
respected German orientalist of the nineteenth century. He
discusses the hadith of Ghadir Khum in his
Muhammedanische Studien (1889-1890) translated in English as
Muslim Studies (1966-1971) under the chapter entitled 'The Hadith in
its Relation to the Conflicts of the Parties of Islam.' Coming
to the Shi'as, Goldziher writes:
'A stronger argument in their [Shi'a's] favour...was their
conviction that the Prophet had expressly designated and
appointed Ali as his successor before his death...Therefore the
'Alid adherents were concerned with inventing and
authorizing traditions which prove Ali's installation by the
direct order of the Prophet. The most widely-known tradition
(the authority of which is not denied even by orthodox
authorities though they deprive it of its intention by a
different interpretation) is the tradition of Khum, whichcame
into being for this purpose and is one of the firmest
foundations of the theses of the 'Alid party." [10]
One would expect such a renowned scholar to prove how the Shi'as
'were concerned with inventing' traditions to support their
theses, but nowhere does Goldziher provide any evidence. After
citing Al-Tirmidhi and Al-Nasa'i in the footnote as the sources
of hadith for
Ghadir, he says: 'Al-Nasa'i had, as is well- known, pro-'Alid
inclinations, and also Al-Tirmidhi included in his collection
tendentious traditions favouring Ali, e.g., the tayr tradition.' [11] This
is again the same old classical response of the Sunni
polemicists - discredit the transmitters as unreliable or
adamantly accuse the Shi'as of inventing the traditions.
Another example is the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of
Islam (1911-1938), which has a short entry under 'Ghadir
Khum' by F Bhul, a Danish orientalist who wrote a biography of
the Prophet. Bhul writes:
'The place has become famous through a tradition which had its
origin among the Shi'as but is also found among the Sunnis,
viz., the Prophet on journey back from Hudaybiyya (according to
others from the Farewell Pilgrimage) here said of Ali:
'Whomsoever I am lord of, his lord is Ali also!" [12]
Bhul makes sure to emphasize that the hadith and the event of
Ghadir has 'its origins among the Shi'as'!
Another striking example of the orientalists' ignorance about
Shi'ism is A Dictionary of Islam (1965) by Thomas Hughes.
Under the entry of Ghadir, he writes:
'A festival of the Shi'as on the 18th of the month of Zu 'l-Hijjah,
when three images of dough filled with honey are made to
represent Abu Bakr, Umar and Usman, which are stuck with knives,
and the honey is sipped as typical of the blood of the usurping khalifahs.
The festival is named Ghadir, 'a pool,' and the festival
commemorates, it is said, Muhammad having declared Ali
his successor at Ghadir Khum, a watering place midway between
Makkah and al-Madinah." [13]
Coming from a Shi'i background of India, having studied in Iran
for 10 years and lived among the Shi'a of Africa and North
America, I have yet to see, hear or read about the dough and
honey ritual of Ghadir!! I was more surprised to see that even
Vaglieri, in the second edition of the Encyclopaedia
of Islam, has
incorporated this rubbish into her fairly excellent article on
Ghadir Khum. She adds at the end: 'This feast also holds an
important role among the Nusayris.' It is quite possible that
the dough and honey ritual is observed by the Nusayris; it has
nothing to do with the Shi'as. But do all orientalists know the
difference between the Shi'as and the Nusayris? I very much
doubt so.
A fourth example from the contemporary scholars who have treaded
the same path is Philip Hitti in his History of the Arabs(1964).
After mentioning that the Buyids established 'the rejoicing on
that [day] of the Prophet's alleged appointment of Ali as
his successor at Ghadir Khum,' he describes the location of
Ghadir Khum in the footnote as 'a spring between Makkah and al-Madinah
where Shi'ite tradition asserts the Prophet declared, "Whosoever
I am lord of, his lord is Ali also". [14]Although
this scholar mentions the issue of Ghadir in a passing manner,
still he wants to leave his readers with the impression that
the hadith of Ghadir is a 'Shi'ite tradition.'
To these scholars who, consciously or unconsciously, have
absorbed the Sunni bias against Shi'ism and insist on the Shi'i
origin or invention of the hadith of Ghadir, I would just
repeat what Vaglieri has said in the Encyclopaedia of Islam about
Ghadir Khum:
'It is, however, certain that Muhammad did speak in this place
and utter the famous sentence, for the account of this event has
been preserved, either in a concise form or in detail, not only
by Al-Ya'kubi, whose sympathy for the 'Alid cause is well-known,
but also in the collection of traditions which are considered as
canonical, especially in the Musnad of Ibn Hanbal; and the
hadiths are so numerous and so well attested by the different
isnads that it does not seem possible to reject them." [15]
Vaglieri continues:
'Several of these hadith are cited in the bibliography,
but it does not include the hadithwhich, although
reporting the sentence, omit to name Ghadir Khum, or those which
state that the sentence was pronounced at al-Hudaybiyya. The
complete documentation will be facilitated when the Concordance of
Wensinck has been completely published. In order to have an idea
of how numerous these hadiths are, it is enough to glance at the
pages in which Ibn Kathir has collected a great number of them
with theirisnads.'
It is time the western scholarship made itself familiar with the
Shi'i literature of the early days as well as of the
contemporary period. There is no need to wait for Wensinck's Concordance.
The Shi'i scholars have produced great works on the issue of
Ghadir Khum. Here I will just mention two of those. The first is'Abaqat
al-Anwar written in
Persian by Allama Mir Hamid Husayn al-Musawi (d. 1304 AH) of
India. Allama Mir Hamid Husayn has devoted two bulky volumes
(consisting of about 1,080 pages) on the isnad, tawatur and
meaning of the hadithof
Ghadir. The second is Al-Ghadir in
11 volumes in Arabic by Allama Abdul Husayn al-Amini where he
gives with full references the names of 110 sahaba of
the Prophet and also 84tabi'un (disciples
of the sahaba)
who have narrated the hadithof
Ghadir. He has also chronologically given the names of the
historians, traditionists, exegetists and poets who have
mentioned the hadith of
Ghadir from the first until the fourteenth Islamic century.
IV. Shaban & His New Interpretation
Among the latest work by the western scholarship on the history
of Islam is M A Shaban's Islamic History AD 600-750,
subtitled 'A New Interpretation,' in which the author claims not
only to use newly discovered material but also to reexamine and
reinterpret material which has been known to us for many
decades. Shaban, a lecturer of Arabic at SOAS of the University
of London, is not prepared to even consider the event of Ghadir
Khum. He writes: 'The famous Shi'ite tradition that he [the
Prophet] designated Ali as his successor at Ghadir Khum should
not be taken seriously.' Shaban gives two 'new' reasons for not
taking the event of Ghadir seriously:
'Such an event is inherently improbable considering the Arabs'
reluctance to entrust young untried men with great
responsibility. Furthermore, at no point do our sources show the
Madinan community behaving as if they had heard of this
designation." [16]
Let us critically examine each of these reasons given by Shaban.
(1) The
traditional reluctance of the Arabs to entrust young men with
great responsibility. First of all, had not the Prophet
introduced many things to which the Arabs were traditionally
reluctant? Was not Islam itself accepted by the Makkans very
reluctantly? This 'traditional reluctance,' instead of being an
argument against the appointment of Ali, is actually part of the
argument used by the Shi'as. They agree that the Arabs were
reluctant to accept Imam Ali as the Prophet's successor not only
because of his young age but also because he had killed their
leaders in the battles of Islam. According to the Shi'as, Allah
also mentions this reluctance when after ordering the Prophet to
proclaim Imam Ali as his successor ('O Messenger! Convey what
had been revealed to you...'), He reassured His Messenger by
saying that 'Allah will protect you from the people' (5:67). The
Prophet was commissioned to convey the message of Allah, no
matter whether the Arabs liked it or not.
Moreover, this 'traditional reluctance' was not an irrevocable
custom of the Arab society as Shaban wants us to believe. Jafry,
in The Origin and Early Development of Shi'a Islam, says:
'Our sources do not fail to point out that, though the 'Senate'
(Nadwa) of pre-Islamic Makkah was generally a council of
elders only, the sons of the chieftain Qusayy were privileged to
be exempted from this age restriction and were admitted to the
council despite their youth. In later times, more liberal
concessions seem to have been in vogue; Abu Jahl was admitted
despite his youth, and Hakim ibn Hazm was admitted when he was
only 15 or 20 years old.'
Then Jafry quotes Ibn 'Abd Rabbih:
'There was no monarchic king over the Arabs of Makkah in the jahiliyyah.
So whenever there was a war, they took a ballot among chieftains
and elected one as 'King,' were he a minor or a grown man. Thus
on the day of Fijar, it was the turn of Banu Hashim, and as a
result of the ballot Al-Abbas, who was then a mere child, was
elected, and they seated him on the shield." [17]
Thirdly, we have an example in the Prophet's own decisions
during the last days of his life when he entrusted the command
of the army to Usama ibn Zayd, a young man who was hardly 20
years of age. [18] He
was appointed over the elders of theMuhajirun and
the Ansar,
and, indeed, many of the elders resented this decision of the
Prophet.[19] If
the Prophet of Islam could appoint the young and untried Usama
ibn Zayd over the elders of the Muhajirun,
then why should it be 'inherently inprobable' to think that the
Prophet had appointed Imam Ali as his successor?
(2) The
traditional reluctance to entrust untried men with great
responsibility. Apart from the young age of Imam Ali, Shaban
also refers to the reluctance of the Arabs in entrusting
'untried men with great responsibility.' This implies that Abu
Bakr was selected by the Arabs because he had been 'tried with
great responsibilities.' I doubt whether Shaban would be able to
substantiate the implication of his claim from Islamic history.
One will find more instances where Imam Ali was entrusted by the
Prophet with greater responsibilities than Abu Bakr. Imam Ali
was left behind in Makkah during the Prophet's migration to
mislead the enemies and also to return the properties of various
people which were given in trust to the Prophet. Imam Ali was
tried with greater responsibilities during the early battles of
Islam in which he was always successful. When the declaration (bara'at)
against the pagan Arabs of Makkah was revealed, first Abu Bakr
was entrusted to convey it to the Makkans, but later on this
great responsibility was taken away from him and entrusted to
Imam Ali. Imam Ali was entrusted with the city and citizens of
Medina while the Prophet had gone on the expedition to Tabuk.
Imam Ali was appointed the leader of the expedition to Yemen.
These are just a few examples which come to mind at random.
Therefore, on a comparative level, Ali ibn Abi Talib was a
person who had been tried and entrusted with greater
responsibilities than Abu Bakr.
(3) The
behaviour of the Medinan community about the declaration of
Ghadir. Firstly, if an event can be proved as true by the
accepted academic standards (of the Sunnis, of course), then the
reaction of the people to that event is immaterial.
Secondly, the same 'traditional reluctance' used by Shaban to
discredit the declaration of Ghadir can be used here against his
scepticism towards the event of Ghadir. This traditional
reluctance, besides other factors which are beyond the scope of
this paper,[20] can
be used to explain the behaviour of the Medinan community.
Thirdly, although the Medinan community was silent during the
events which kept Imam Ali away from the khilafah, there
were many among them who had witnessed the declaration of Ghadir
Khum. On quite a few occasions, Imam Ali implored thesahaba of
the Prophet to bear witness to the declaration of Ghadir. Here I
will just mention one instance which took place in Kufa during
the khilafah of Imam Ali, 24 years after the Prophet's
death.
Imam Ali heard that some people were doubting his claim of
precedency over the previous khulafah, therefore, he came
to a gathering at the mosque and implored the eyewitnesses of
the event of Ghadir Khum to verify the truth of the Prophet's
declaration about his being the lord and master of all the
believers. Many sahaba of the Prophet stood up and
verified the claim of Imam Ali. We have the names of 24 of those
who testified on behalf of Imam Ali, although other sources like
theMusnad of Ibn Hanbal and Majma' az-Zawa'id of
Hafiz al-Haythami put that number at 30. Also bear in mind that
this incident took place 25 years after the event of Ghadir Khum,
and during this period hundreds of eyewitnesses had died
naturally or in the battles fought during the first two khulafah'srule.
Add to this the fact that this incident took place in Kufa which
was far from the centre of the sahabas, Medina. This
incident which took place in Kufa in the year 35 A.H. has itself
been narrated by four sahaba and 14 tabi'un and
has been recorded in most books of history and tradition.[21]
In conclusion, the behaviour of the Medinan community after the
death of the Prophet does not automatically make the declaration
of Ghadir Khum improbable. I think this will suffice to make
Shaban realize that his is not a 'new' interpretation; rather it
exemplifies, in my view, the first stage of the classical
response of the Sunni polemicists - an outright denial of the
existence of an event or a hadith which supports the
Shi'i views - which has been absorbed by the majority of the
western scholars of Islam.
V. Conclusion
In this brief survey, I have shown that the event of Ghadir Khum
is a historical fact which cannot be rejected, and that in
studying Shi'ism, the precommitment to the Judeo-Christian
tradition of the orientalists was compounded with the Sunni bias
against Shi'ism. Consequently, the event of Ghadir Khum was
ignored by most western scholars and emerged from oblivion only
to be handled with skepticism and reinterpretation.
I hope this one example will convince at least some western
scholars to reexamine their methodology in studying Shi'ism, and
instead of approaching it largely through the works of
heresiographers like Ash-Shahristani, Ibn Hazm, Al-Maqrizi and
Al-Baghdadi who present the Shi'as as a heretical sect of Islam,
they should turn to more objective works of both the Shi'as as
well as the Sunnis.
The Shi'as are tired, and rightfully so, of being portrayed as a
heretical sect that emerged because of the political and
economic circumstances of the early Islamic period. They demand
to represent themselves instead of being represented by their
adversaries.
Notes:
[1] Edward W Said, Covering
Islam, New York: Pantheon Books 1981, p xvii.
[2] Marshall G S Hodgson, The
Venture of Islam, Vol 1, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1974, p 27.
[3] Albert Hourani, 'Islamic
History, Middle Eastern History, Modern', in M H Kerr (ed), Islamic
Studies: A Tradition and Its Problems, California: Undena
Publications, 1979, p 10.
[4] Hodgson, op. cit.,
pp. 39-40.
[8] Ibn Khaldun, The
Muqaddimah, tr. Franz Rosenthal, Vol 1, New York: Pantheon
Books, 1958, p 403. In Arabic, see Vol 1, Beirut: Maktabatul
Madrasah, 1961, p 348.
[9] Encyclopaedia of Islam,
1953, see under 'Ghadir Khum'.
[10] I Goldziher, Muslim
Studies, tr. Barber and Stern, Vol 2, Chicago: Aldine Inc,
1971, pp. 112-113.
[12] Encyclopaedia of Islam,
1911-1938, see under 'Ghadir Khum'.
[13] Thomas P Hughes, A
Dictionary of Islam, New Jersey: Reference Book Publisbers,
1965, p. 138.
[14] Philip K Hitti, A
History of the Arabs, London: Macmillan & Co, 1964, p 471.
[15] Encyclopaedia of Islam,
1953, see under 'Ghadir Khum'.
[16] M A Shaban, Islamic
History AD 600-750, Cambridge: University Press, 1971, p 16.
[17] S H M Jafri, The Origin
and Early Development of Shi'a Islam, London: Longman, 1979,
p. 22
[18] M H Haykal, The Life of
Muhammad, tr. Al-Faruqi (n.p., American Trust Publications,
1976, p 492.
[19] See the Tabaqat of
Ibn Sa'd and other major works onSeerah.
[20] For more details, see S S
A Rizvi, Imamate, Tehran: WOFIS, 1985, pp 120-121.
[21] For full references, see
Al-Amini, Al-Ghadir, Vol 1, Tehran: Mu'assatul Muwahhidi,
1976, pp 166-186.
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