Transmitted Evidence for Legitimizing Role of Election

There is adequate transmitted evidence for the legitimizing role of election. Opponents of the view suggest that the relevant evidence should not be taken at face value, but such argument is circular. Moreover, their objections to the validity of chains of transmitters of such evidence are unfounded. Their insistence on irrelevance of public allegiance (bay‘a) to actualization of the rule (wilāya) is based on taking wilāya to amount to the obligation of obedience—taking the unqualified evidence for obligation of obedience to ground an unconditional rule. The reason why they make a distinction between Infallible (ma‘ṣūm) and non-Infallible rulers vis-à-vis political legitimacy—that is, the enforcement of manipulations and forbiddance of subversion—is that they have confused divine appointment to wilāya with an independent legislation of a declaratory (waḍ‘ī) law. This will no longer seem odd if we take the appointment to wilāya as a defining (taklīfī) law assigning the supervision of people to the ruler; thus, the obligation of his obedience. For we can draw a distinction between essential forbiddance and accidental forbiddance of electing a fallible ruler. In this paper, I deploy the logical analytic method to formulate arguments against the legitimizing role of election.