About the Author

Dr Abdulaziz A Sachedina is professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. He is the author of numerous books and articles including Islamic Messianism and The Just Ruler in Shi'ite Islam.

In the Name of Allah, the Merciful the Compassionate

Chapter 2

WiIaya of Imam Ali and itsTheological-Juridical Implicationsfor the Islamic Political Thought

By Abdulaziz A SachedinaThis paper examines the Qur'anic origins of the concept ofwilaya in light of its connection with the historical wilaya ofImam Ali. Various explanations of the concept in the Qur'anicexegesis, written by different schools of thought in Islam, havebeen studied to investigate the theological importance of wilayato the fundamental doctrine of the leadership (imama) in Islam.The close relationship between the doctrines of divine justice(al-'Adl) and the necessity of the divinely-appointed imam in theShi'i school of thought underscore the pivotal status of theacceptance of the wilaya of Imam Ali as imperative to the faithof believers. At the same time, recognition of this wilaya ofImam Ali is regarded as a precondition to the establishment ofthe ideal public order based on the divine scale of justice.Consequently, no ideal public order is conceivable in Islamwithout the imama being invested in the person in whom thiswilaya is validated through a divine designation. This theologicalrelationship between the imama and wilaya through divinedesignation made it juridically problematic for anyone otherthan the divinely appointed Imam to assume the absolute wilayain the Muslim Ummah. This problem of assuming the wilaya byother than the Imam himself was duly treated in the Shi'ijurisprudence, which carefully defined the limits of juridicalwilaya in relation to the theological wilaya of the Imam. Thepaper, thus, demonstrates the significance of the wilaya of ImamAli in the Qur'anic context of establishing the public order andthe necessity of accepting the interdependency between imamaand waliya in Islamic leadership while differentiating betweentheological and juridical forms of wilaya.