Emamat Pajouhi

Emamat Pajouhi

Imam al-Hadi's Specific Invocation of Hadith al-Manzila in al-Ziyara al-Ghadiriyya: An Analysis

Document Type : Original Article

Author
Mohammad Ali Movahhedi
Faculty member of the Department of Shiʿa Studies, University of Religions and Denominations, Qom, Iran
10.22034/jep.2026.553305.1689
Abstract
Previous research has established that Hadith al-Manzila attributes to Imam Ali (A.S.) all the stations of Aaron. Some Sunni theologians, seeking to deflect this implication, have confined the report to the Tabuk campaign and reduced it to a limited deputation during the Prophet's (P.B.U.H.) lifetime. Sunni sources show that before 233 AH, when al-Ziyara al-Ghadiriyya was issued, the report was either transmitted without temporal or spatial qualification or only with Tabuk as its setting. Evidence from the first half of the second century AH also indicates that leading Sunni scholars of the period discouraged transmitters from narrating it. In the early third century, versions of its content were additionally fabricated in favor of the first and second caliphs. In this setting Imam al-Hadi (A.S.), while recounting other virtues of Imam Ali in al-Ziyara al-Ghadiriyya, invoked Hadith al-Manzila in a context that, first, concerned an event other than Tabuk under entirely different circumstances; second, indicated multiple Aaronic stations beyond succession; and third, excluded their realization in the caliphs. Besides cataloguing the report's settings and clarifying Sunni scholarly engagement with it in the first half of the third century, this study's chief contribution is to uncover the implicit dimensions of Imam al-Hadi's use of Hadith al-Manzila in al-Ziyara al-Ghadiriyya.
Keywords
Imam al-Hadi (A.S.)
Hadith al-Manzila
Tabuk
al-Ziyara al-Ghadiriyya
Subjects