Abstract
The issue of imāmate has been one of the main problems among Muslims since the death of the Prophet Muhammad (sav). al-Qādī Abd al-Jabbār said that the imāmate is not related to prophethood. In fact it is a matter of the emirate. But according to “Imāmiyya”, imāmate is the continuation of the prophethood and hence an issue of “belief”. For this purpose, they formed the idea of twelve infallible imams and claimed that all of them were assigned by the nass. al-Qâdî Abd al-Jabbâr rejected such principles of the imāmate. He wrote the twentieth volume of his work titled al-Mughnī specifically about this issue and refused the Imāmiyya. Veysi Unverdi, in his work titled Muʽtazila and Imāmate, studied al-Mughnī and revealed the main points of al-Qādī Abd al-Jabbâr’s explanations about the Imâmiyyah. Apparently, Unverdi applied the method used by al-Qâdī Abd al-Jabbār to his own work. He proved the views attributed by al-Qādī Abd al-Jabbār to Imāmiyya from the basic works of Imāmiyya. Therewithal, he stated the views of the Ahl al-Sunna about the imāmate as well and compared them with the views of al-Qādī Abd al-Jabbār. He concludes that both views are similar. This fact points to an important contradiction. Because, al-Qādī Abd al-Jabbār on the one hand rejected Imāmiyya’s thought of imāmate, but on the other hand to do this, used similar arguments with Ahl al-Sunna, which he also criticized. Additionally, this work of Unverdi is an important work to compare the views of Muʽtazila, Imāmiyya, and Ahl alSunnah on the issue of imāmate in the fields of History of Islamic Sects and Kalām.