Witnessing the Siraat

It is written in Mustadrak of Thiqat al-Islam Noori that according to what is mentioned in Anwaar-ul-Maziyyah (by Syed Gayasuddin Najafi, a Shia jurisprudent and a famous scholar among Imamiyah): 

In our village situated near Hilla there lived a man named Muhammad bin Abi Azeenah. He was the trustee of a mosque. He used to attend that masjid daily as a routine every day. 


One day, when he did not come to mosque, we inquired about him. We came to know that he was ill. We wondered very much because on the very previous day, we had seen him hale and healthy. When we went to see him, we found him burnt from head to feet. He used to faint, them become conscious and again faint. 


In one such interval, I asked him what had happened to him? He replied: Last night in my dream I was shown Siraat and then I was ordered to walk over it. So I proceeded; in the beginning the ground under my feet was levelled. Then I found that it has become thin. Initially, it was soft but later on it turned very sharp. I was putting my steps very slowly, balancing myself to escape falling down. Dark flames of fire from beneath were leaping upwards. I was observing that many people were dropping down like leaves in the fall (autumn). 


Once I felt that there was nothing except an hair like rope under my feet. Then suddenly the fire dragged me to it and I also fell down in that cave of fire. The more I tried to come up the more I was going down. (Hellfire has the quality of drawing people to it, and that, according to a narration, the depth is equal to the length of a seventy year journey). As soon as I realized that I was about to be finished, I remembered that whenever I was falling or stumbling or falling, I used to exclaim Yaa Ali and saying Yaa Maulaai, Yaa Ameerul Momineen, Aghithni. I felt inspired to look upward. 


So when I looked up I found that a saintly person was standing by the side of the Siraat. He extended his hand, caught me and fetched me out. I submitted: O Master! I am burnt down. Please help me. The Hazrat passed his Holy hand over my body from my knee to femur. Suddenly I woke up to find that that particular part of my body had no sign of burning and that it had healed but the rest of my body was burning.


That person remained bedridden for three months, weeping and complaining. Various medicines were given by a number of doctors before he became healthy after three months when fresh flesh appeared on his body. It is also written in this book Mystadrak that whenever that person was describing this even he was getting fever and was trembling.


Doubtlessly there is only one medicine and it is to cling to the Wilayat of the pious Ahle Bayt (a.s.). Imam Reza (a.s.) has promised that he will guide the visitors of his shrine on the bridge of Siraat. Moreover, Hazrat Abu Abdullah-al-Husain (a.s.) is also reported to have given many good tidings to those who cling to the friendship (Wilayat) of Ahle Bayt (a.s.) with regard to Siraat.
The Hereafter - Ma'ad; by Ayatullah Dastghaib Shiraazi

An interesting story about Sayyid Razi - The compiler of Nahjul Balagah

There is an interesting story how Sayyid Razi and his elder brother 'Ali Abual-Kasim Sayyid Murtaza started their formal Islamic education. According to Ibn Abi al-Hadid in Sharh Nahj al-Balaghah, Shaykh Mufid saw a dream that a lady appearing to be the Prophet's daughter Hazrat Fatimah Zahra' ('a) entered his mosque in the Karkh locality of Baghdad with two small boys and asked him to teach them fiqh. The Shaykh woke up in a rather perplexed state of mind in view of his own paucity of knowledge when compared to Imam Hasan (a.s.) and Imam Husayn (a.s.).

Bural place of Shaykh Mufid - Kadhmain

But the next day when Fatimah, the wife of the Naqib al-Nuqaba ', entered the mosque with her two sons and requested him to teach them Islamic sciences, he understood the purport of his dream and accepted her request with great honour.

The two brothers together soon mastered different branches of Islamic sciences under Shaykh Mufid and other leading scholars of Baghdad, but unlike Sayyid Razi who was more inclined towards politics and literature, Sayyid Mortaza was deeply interested in fiqh.

Sayyid Murtaza, who acquired the epithet of 'Alam al-Huda, was four years older than his brother and died at the age of 81 years in 436/ 1044.  He served as Naqib al-Nuqaba' after the death of Sayyid Razi and was considered a master of kalam, fiqh, usul al- fiqh, literature, grammar, poetry and other fields of knowledge. His divan or poetical composition runs into more than 20,000 verses. He authored several books such as al-Shafi fl al-Imamah, al- Dhakh'irah fi Usul al-Fiqh, al-Ghurar wa al-Durar, and al-Tanzih.

Biography of Sayyid Sharaf Ar Razi - The compiler of Nahjul Balagah; By: Dr. Sayyid Muhammad Mahdi Ja'fari