Creedal Foundations of Waliyic Islam- Blake Archer Williams

This book originally started as an essay that was meant to serve as an introduction to The Regency of the Magisterium (Lion of Najaf Publishers, 2017), which is what I characterized as my “exegetical rendering” of Ayatollah Javaqdi-e Amoli’s Persian book, Velayat-e Faqih. But as I started to write the introduction, I realized that there was an urgent need to fully define all of the technical vocabulary that I needed to use, because terms such as welayat, imamat, hojjat, esmat, feqahat, rububiat, and so on had not been either properly or fully defined in the English language, especially with respect to their waliyic aspect… The two books taken together are an attempt at a comprehensive treatment of what is called Waliyic Islam approached from the perspective of Shi’a Islam itself, as opposed to the perspective of orientalism or some other branch of the humanities, all of whose perspectives are ultimately philosophical in their underpinnings and bearings and therefore do not reflect the religion as it is understood by the clerisy of the religion itself, but do so from a perspective and ideological framework that is alien and indeed antithetical and at times hostile to it… And so, for a refreshing change, you will be reading a book on Islam written from an inner religious perspective, and not one which pretends to be about the religion but is actually about the philosophy of religion, where philosophy is the noun and religion is a secondary prepositional adjunct to it.

And so, in addition to its unique religious rather than academic, “objective” approach, what is specifically unique about this book is that it provides, probably for the first time in English, the following treatments:

- A definition and exposition of what Imamic or explicatory revelation is, and how the need for it continues after the occultation, and how the magisters fulfill the role of explicatory revelation (though imperfectly) in the absence of immaculate guidance.
- A detailed definition of the theoretical aspects of the Imamate, together with a long chapter on the historical realities of what the imamate actually turned into and why.

- A collection of all of the major instances of tansis or the divine investiture of Imam Ali the Twelve Imams to the succession to the Prophet and to the office of his imamate, all of which have been sourced exclusively from Sonni hadith scripture.

- The nature and function of feqhicity and the post-occultation authority of the Shi’a clerisy.

- A summary of the 22 rational and scriptural proofs in Imam Khomeini’s seminal 1970 book Islamic Governance

- The theoretical framework and logic of how all of the above creedal beliefs relate to each other and flow together to give rise to the theory of velayat-e faqih.