Mentor-Centricity and Managers of Illuminative Religion

An Analysis of Chapter Four of Deception and Divine Religion by Sadeq Khademi

Introduction

Chapter Four of Deception and Divine Religion by Sadeq Khademi elucidates the pivotal role of divinely appointed mentors and managers in the vitality and authenticity of religious faith. Khademi articulates a theology wherein divine religion is sustained through the guidance of charismatic, sanctified figures endowed with divine revelation and illumination. These mentors, selected and nurtured by God, serve as intermediaries between the divine and humanity, ensuring the spiritual health, guidance, and salvation of believers. This article offers a comprehensive and academic translation of the chapter, preserving its theological depth and philosophical nuance. It explores Khademi’s concepts of mentor-centricity, divine guardianship, and the management of illuminative religion, emphasizing their ontological and practical implications for religious life. The analysis underscores the necessity of living, divinely inspired mentors to maintain the dynamism and purity of faith, while critiquing the perils of ritualistic, mentor-less religion and deceptive religious leadership.

Divine Revelation and the Role of Mentors

Khademi posits that in the realm of divine revelation and prophetic illumination, God retains sovereign authority over the destiny, salvation, and inner spiritual guidance of His servants toward Himself. He entrusts the stewardship of humanity to individuals whom He has ontologically formed, selected, and nurtured through His special grace and direct attention. These mentors are endowed with divine charisma (farahmandi), inner purity, sanctity, proximity to God, and a sincere connection with people. Only such a figure, perpetually and securely connected to the divine truth, unerring in their receptivity to revelation and divine utterance, can rightly comprehend and impart truth and righteousness.

The vitality of religion depends on the presence and accessibility of its divine saints, whose illuminative interpretations and explications sustain its spiritual essence. In eras where these true mentors and saints are obscured or absent, religion ceases to be a living, dynamic, transformative, and effective force, even if it retains numerous adherents who diligently perform its rituals and observances. Such followers, bereft of the spirit, knowledge, and spirituality of religion, become superficial, clinging to a lifeless, hypocritical shell of faith. Unaware of the death of their religion and the ignorance of their rigid, un-divine religiosity, they perpetuate a mute, ineffective faith devoid of self-awareness, theoretical depth, responsiveness, or practical efficacy. Far from benefiting humanity, such a religion engenders corruption, fosters religious despotism, and undermines the safety and security of people. Khademi promises a later discussion on the corruptions of mentor-less religion, particularly the machinations of religious profiteers who exploit faith for worldly gain.

The Divine Intermediary: Ontological Superiority and Sanctity

The intermediary between God and humanity is by no means an ordinary individual, equal to others in a vertical, ontological sense. A true path to divine proximity requires divine selection, servitude’s divine servitude, ontological purity, and inherent sanctity. This path is characterized by professional prophethood, messengership, imamate, and, in Persian terminology, illuminative sagacity and inner divine charisma, all contingent upon divine appointment. Natural intermediaries in this path are those divinely selected, divinely nurtured, and directly educated by God under His special care and protection. A religion mediated by ordinary, false, or self-appointed figures lacking the requisite qualities and divine appointment is devoid of legitimacy and sanctity. Following such a religion is not only unnecessary but constitutes ignorance, misguidance, and corruption, as its integrity and efficacy are inherently corrupt, deviant, and aberrant due to its disconnection from divine truth and its usurpative, futile nature.

Mentor-Centric Religion: Illumination and Cultivation

An inherent, ontological religion, if unable to autonomously draw from divine revelation, can become articulate and acquire the necessary knowledge for a divine life through mentor-centric cultivation. Such a religion is guided by living divine saints and sages who, through their luminous hearts and divinely bestowed wisdom, coexist with divine revelation. These sages and recipients of informative revelation are the cause of the sacred vitality of divine religion and the perpetuation of healthy religiosity among people, having been ontologically and divinely appointed for the system of imamate and religious authority.

The logic of understanding divine knowledge and religious studies is sage-centric and imam-guided, not text-centric or reliant on mute revelation and tradition. The legitimacy and guidance of religion are contingently centered on the charismatic divine saint, who possesses the capacity to explicate religious texts for those endowed with undoubting receptivity, yielding results through resilient, devoted cultivation. This process transforms religion into a conscious, professional practice. Professional religiosity and divine charisma require not only the capacity for attentive listening and openness to critique and benevolence but also a cultivable disposition to accept divine events without doubt or condition, with expansive willingness and voluntary alignment with the station of infallibility. This entails following true sages and charismatic figures—those divinely appointed as intermediaries, preeminent in servitude, leadership in truth-seeking, and imamate in divine orientation—according to their wisdom and knowledge.

The Necessity of Mentors: An Analogy with Professional Training

Khademi draws an analogy with professional sports, where a competent coach is indispensable for achieving technical excellence, success, and superiority. A coach with specialized knowledge, practical experience, and the ability to tailor training and motivate athletes for honest and fair performance is universally acknowledged as essential. Similarly, religion, like physical training, requires a mentor to contingently facilitate its growth, guiding the believer from general religiosity to semi-professional truth-seeking and fairness, and ultimately to professional religiosity, characterized by divine guardianship and faith. Without accepting the mediation of a divine sage or imam, an individual remains confined to general religiosity, at risk of straying into misguidance or adopting a deceptive veneer of faith in place of authentic, general divine religion.

The Dynamics of Faith: Growth and Perils of Stagnation

General religion requires continuous growth to attain faith. Even at the stage of faith, stagnation leads to decline, transforming faith into a quagmire of polytheism or a swamp of disbelief, reflecting its opposite. Faith must perpetually grow and ascend to retain its freshness and divine vitality, ensuring the efficacy of religious practice amidst the darkness of the absence of prophets and divine saints. Through communion with sincere religious mentors, faith and religiosity are illuminated and fortified by their inner purity, sanctity, and divine assistance, sustaining their resilience and clarity.

The Role of Mentors in Revitalizing Mute Religion

A mute religion and its static texts require a divine mentor to become living, guiding, articulate, truthful, active, resilient, and capable of ascending to higher ranks. Such a mentor fosters transparency, eloquence, sincerity, unity, and growth, safeguarding religion from sectarianism, distortion, and superstition. Mentor-centric religiosity progresses along the straight path of divine guidance and bestowed divine guardianship, driven by divine grace and the mentor’s assistance, ensuring continuous, increasing, and forward-moving development. In contrast, religiosity without a competent mentor results in decline, failure, or stagnation at the level of general religiosity, relinquishing sincerity, purity, fairness, guardianship, and knowledge. In the tumult of the absence of prophets and divine saints, such religiosity loses its resilience, succumbing to the shadows of doubt, polytheism, and disbelief.

Mentor-Centricity and Direct Access to Divine Truth

Mentor-centric religion directly connects to divine sages and saints, bypassing indirect reliance on ancient textual chains fraught with uncertainties and probabilities. The ontological religion within divine saints serves as the interpreter and elucidator of revelatory texts, rendering them transparent and articulate, free from ambiguity and generality. The primary function of the sage mentor and divine intermediary is to transform inner wisdom and knowledge into empirical, experimental sciences, conceptual philosophy, and rational understanding, bridging the esoteric and the exoteric.

Challenges of Mentor-less Religious Leadership

A significant challenge for many religious authorities claiming jurisprudential or referential status is their lack of education under a living, wise sage. Such individuals cannot achieve conscious, balanced, or professional religiosity, let alone attain theological or divine knowledge. The Persian poet Jami eloquently captures this in his Haft Awrang: “A being not endowed by the Creator / How can it endow existence to another? / A dry cloud, bereft of water / Cannot yield the quality of giving rain.” The hallmark of religious guidance lies in the ontological divine illumination and proximity to divine sages, reflecting their inherent love and connection to the divine, as recipients of revelation and divine guidance. However, if the intermediary is prioritized over their divine illumination, they become an obstacle to truth, failing to fulfill their role as a mirror of divine guidance and a facilitator of proximity to God.

Official Mentors of Religion

The divine mentor, enlightened and empowered by divine revelation, is commissioned by God to convey His message. Such mentors must not be confused with those who acquire knowledge through discursive or acquired sciences, or who are merely sages or philosophers in specific domains. Official religious mentors, in their utmost servitude to God, are divinely endowed with inner perfections and conferred guardianship, including theoretical and practical infallibility in the form of prophethood. A prophet may possess a written scripture or theoretical, wisdom-based, or doctrinal elucidations, or manifest practical miracles and eloquent signs within society, without a written revelation. A divine mentor may, beyond prophethood, bear a messengership with a written scripture or possess theoretical elucidations, or hold the station of imamate, coexisting with divine will as a continuation of a prophet’s mission. Imams, as successors and deputies of prophets, possess elucidations and, notably, theoretical miracles, with knowledge bestowed upon the worthy by divine will. Additionally, a divine mentor may hold a caliphate, entailing political succession and divine management.

Terminology of Divine Mentors

The term “prophet” (nabi) derives from naba’a, signifying a lofty and exalted station before God. “Messenger” (rasul) denotes one sent by God with deliberation to fulfill a mission, such as conveying religion. “Imam” signifies a forerunner, embodying the path of divine guidance in its spiritual essence. Imamate and sagacity are contingent upon fulfilling their conditions; in non-infallible individuals prone to error or sin, the absence of these conditions negates their religious legitimacy, authority, or worthiness of obedience.

Limitations of Non-Charismatic Religious Authorities

Understanding religion and its teachings cannot rely on texts authored by superficial jurists, priests, rabbis, or non-charismatic Zoroastrian priests, or religious associations lacking divine sages, as these are ordinary human endeavors. For instance, citing the views of St. Augustine (354–430 CE) does not equate to understanding mainstream Christianity or the dominant Catholic Church. Similarly, referring to the opinions of a prominent Shi‘i Ayatollah or jurist does not constitute knowledge of the Shi‘i school or the infallible culture of its pure Imams, which represents official divine religion.

Unified Methodology of Beloved Mentors

If Shi‘i scholars are among the beloved or at least among the sages and saints, living according to divine methodology and aligned with divine will, they possess a unified, consistent approach to religious understanding, jurisprudence, and divine inspiration. Divine mentors, as beloved figures endowed with divine grace without prior asceticism or supererogatory worship—relying solely on obligatory religious duties—call all to unity, harmony, and love. However, even in this system, individualism is not dominant or primary; the legal personality of the intermediary, defined by divine revelation and special divine grace, is the center of trust and legitimacy.

Systemic Understanding and Flexibility

A school’s methodological coherence and unified, systemic logic of understanding entail harmonized views and creative adaptability to emerging contemporary issues, up to the point where virtues and perfectionist values remain equivalent. However, with the superiority or relative finality of one mentor’s virtue and greater capacity for inspiration, their views become uniquely distinguished, proportionate to their elevated station. Thus, the mentor-centric system of sagacity is not person-centric; its regulatory focus is subordinate to its systemic focus. Reference to a divine intermediary is based on their possession of the system of sagacity, but it does not halt at the individual. Submission to the system of sagacity directs one to a living, contemporary, accessible sage of higher quality and greater knowledge, capable of transparently and accurately proclaiming divine messages.

Ontological Nature of Sagacity and Imamate

Just as genius, inherent religiosity, sagacity, and sanctity are ontological and divinely bestowed, being beloved—determined by divine will—and imamate, as coexistence with divine will, are similarly ontological, illuminative, and descending. God has servants whom He loves, who in turn love Him and His creation, living according to His will. A divinely determined beloved, a guest of divine knowledge, divinely bestowed truth, and divine will, is a leader and imam of humanity due to this preeminence. If endowed with divine authority, prophethood, or inner imamate for guiding and supporting people, their love for humanity drives them to strive, proclaim, sacrifice, and exhibit selfless, untainted love for freedom, rights, knowledge, and the eradication of superstition, embodying the self-sufficiency and richness of the divine.

The Beloved Mentor’s Role in Transforming Faith

A divinely determined beloved is a triumphant servant with an eternal path and religion. Possessing a divine epistemological and religious system, they are so intensely illuminated that they cannot conform to a conceptual, non-charismatic system of jurisprudence or follow error-prone, embellishing jurists. They excel in transforming religion and God’s servants into affirmation, confirmation, heartfelt affection, spiritual love, and faith, with a robust inclination toward sincerity, love, and spiritual unity.

Imams and Sages: Guiding with Divine Love

Divine imams and sages, based on a divine ethos of universal love and guardianship for believers or civic fairness for citizens, inspire people to follow righteousness, inner inclination, and conscious choice through devotion and love. True, unadorned religion must be received from divine imams, religious saints, and charismatic figures, at minimum from sages and sanctified, heartfelt philosophers. Above sages are living, present divine saints, divinely determined beloved figures, and accessible imams who coexist with divine will and live divine necessities.

Divinely Determined Saints and Their Authority

Some divine saints are divinely determined beloved figures, endowed with the authority to guide and support humanity. The term “determined” is explanatory, not cautionary. Their guardianship is the vitality of divine life and the spirit of religion and faith. Through their ability to connect via heart and inner self to God’s revelatory scripture and living divine inspirations, they receive, preserve, and confidently convey truths—solutions and responses tailored to human needs. While their errors are not wholly absent and remain possible, their divinely bestowed knowledge and oversight of necessary sciences are so precise that they do not preclude general trust. They apprehend religion, knowledge, and wisdom through conscientious justice, expansive inner development, experiential knowledge, and unity with phenomenal truths, guided by bestowed guardianship or a sanctified disposition.

Discerning Hypocrisy and Infiltration

Sages and divine saints, through their inner knowledge and divinely bestowed discernment, possess the capacity to detect hypocrisy and systematic infiltration, safeguarding the integrity of religion.

Transverse Finality and Longitudinal Growth of Religion

In the era of occultation, the transverse growth of religion has been halted by the doctrine of finality, sealing all divine rulings and rituals, simplified and adapted to human resilience and capacity, rendering them immutable. However, the longitudinal, qualitative growth of religion remains ontologically active. Divinely beloved sages or saints, aided by luminous reason, inner wisdom, spiritual knowledge, and divinely bestowed truth, independently derive insights from this epistemological system. Unlike prophets reliant on descending revelation, they continually draw vitality from the mute Muhammadan text, expanding and elucidating it without founding a new religion. This process is elaborated in Khademi’s Knowledge and Divine Humanity.

Independence of Divine Epistemology

With the cessation of legislative and prophetic revelation, God has granted autonomy and self-sufficiency to the divinely referenced epistemological and inspirational system, endowing it with authority, resilience, efficacy, and sustained divine creativity. This system manifests the independence of truth from the personal reality of sages, terminating their individual centrality in receiving divine truth and establishing the direct, living agency of God and truth-centricity.

Public Access to Divine Sages

People, like divine saints, are lovers of truth. If they have access to saints possessing elevated ranks of divine religion and divine truths, who present religion with scholarly rigor, courageously discard unsubstantiated traditions, reject fanaticism toward erroneous ancestral or scholarly legacies, and avoid deeming fallible religious figures infallible, responding to religious issues with magnanimity, open-mindedness, compassion, eloquence, and logical, rational, and scientific clarity—free from materialism and divisiveness, guided by divine sages—the roots of interreligious conflicts and disputes among adherents would wither. Religion, faith, and divine sages, like the infallible prophets of the past, would become beloved to humanity.

Divine Management and Governance

Among believers endowed with illuminative and descending divine revelation, divine managers emerge. A political ruler, as God’s representative and deputy, executes divine will and manages its domain to establish religion, divine teachings, and justice, provided they meet the conditions of general deputyship. A manager lacking divine charisma, sanctity, or authorization from qualified, just jurists lacks legitimacy and the capacity to ensure justice and public welfare.

Philosophy of Divine Management

The philosophy of management is to secure the welfare, interests, and salvation of people. Conditions for leadership and management include presenting a comprehensive leadership plan and a transparent program for societal management, delineating the means of ensuring public welfare and salvation, validated by jurisprudential authority. Divine management and sanctified governance require a conscious, scholarly plan for societal management, supported by penetrating, enduring spiritual insight and divine revelation, which empowers the sanctified manager with clarity and capability in understanding past events or resolving contemporary challenges. Management reliant on divine revelation guides each individual toward their unique nature and perfection, freely and voluntarily, fostering the conditions for religiosity, inner flourishing, heartfelt devotion, the emergence of love, and the manifestation of resolute will.

Ontological Basis of Management

Management is ontologically tied to sagacity, divine confirmation, and appointment, not a contrived, contractual, or merely elective matter based on conventional criteria. The capacity of divine charisma and sagacity does not stem from detached military authority, coercion, wealth, or financial incentives. A divine ruler, increasingly detached from material and coercive forces, is more effective, impactful, and penetrating, as their innovation and creativity in leadership derive from God’s exclusive guidance and semantic, transcendent phenomena, granting them the ability to inspire devotion, affection, love, or unity in others. These dynamics are detailed in Knowledge and Divine Humanity.

Legitimacy of Divine Leadership

Religious leadership and political management, if devoid of divine appointment and connection to divine governance and sanctified rule, lack sanctity and, due to their absence of law, program, or order, are accursed by God and humanity. Such leadership is unjust, disordered, oppressive, defective, repugnant, and debased, offering no salvation or escape, only impasse, severity, constraint, predicament, pressure, and constriction.

The Law of Divine Religion

For the believer, divine religion is the law, and deception, lacking the ontological divine religion, possesses no law. Lawlessness, or the absence of a program, is the primary characteristic of dominant religious deception.

Conclusion

Chapter Four of Deception and Divine Religion by Sadeq Khademi presents a profound theological and philosophical exposition on the centrality of divinely appointed mentors and managers in sustaining the vitality, authenticity, and efficacy of divine religion. Khademi emphasizes the ontological necessity of charismatic, sanctified intermediaries—prophets, messengers, imams, and sages—who, through divine revelation and illumination, guide humanity toward truth, salvation, and divine proximity. The absence of such mentors results in a mute, superficial, and corrupt religion, prone to despotism and deception. By contrast, mentor-centric religiosity, grounded in divine appointment and continuous growth, fosters a living, dynamic faith resilient against ignorance, rigidity, and hypocrisy. Khademi’s framework, enriched by analogies to professional training and critiques of mentor-less leadership, underscores the indispensable role of divine sages in interpreting revelation, managing society, and safeguarding the spiritual and civic welfare of humanity. This chapter offers a compelling vision for a religion that is not only divine in origin but also transformative in practice, reliant on the living presence of God’s beloved saints.