collection of falsehoods, to such an extent that the brilliant sun of God's religion seemed, little by little, to have become obscured under so many lies and forgeries. It is here that the constancy and self-sacrifices of the Imams of the Prophet's household act as savior of Islam, and these noble personalities and their devoted Shi'ah followers rise to protect Islam, and engage in their perpetual and bloody combat with forgers and their supporters.
On the other hand the sentinels of paganism, namely the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs, endeavour to preserve the falsehoods which have been fabricated especially in the time of Mu'awiyah, and even to spread them more widely every moment, since the foundation of their caliphate is nothing but dishonesty. In the battlefield of right and wrong, this combat between the party of God and Satan's never ends, and no period is free from it.
In our own time, a keen-eyed scholar has with his penetrating. insightfulness taken a great step to draw a line between truth and falsehood, and he has obliterated from the scene of history hundreds of falsehoods and alteration. Forty years of continual research in first-hand texts of history and tradition has led the scholar Sayyid Murtada 'Askari to certain facts, which are published in a series of research volumes entitled "Dirasat fi al-hadith wa at-tarikh". His daily scrutiny, reflection and labor have enabled him to unearth from thick layers of forgeries many true facts of Islam, and to place them at the disposal of seekers of truth in the world.
Indeed now the big idols and high barriers in the way of a proper understanding of the history of Islam have been broken, and such early and well-known texts as the at-Tabari history, a pioneer of historians, can no longer be relied on without reference to their research values. Thus Mahmud Abu Rayh, the famous and free-minded Egyptian scholar, rightly says: "Everyone who longs to be acquainted with the facts of the history of Islam since the time of its advent until the period of allegiance to Yazid must study the two valuable research books of 'Abd Allah ibn Saba' and Ahadith of Umm al-Mu'minin 'A'ishah."(2)
The author of this book, scholar Sayyid Murtada 'Askari, is