The website of Isra foundation: On the occasion of the 20th of Jamadī al-Thani, the birth anniversary of the Lady Fatimah al-Zahra (̒a), we will review some of the remarks of Grand Ayatollah Javadi Amoli concerning the exalted station of the Noble Lady, Fatimah al-Zahra (̒a). 

Referring to the intellectual greatness of the Lady Fatimah al-Zahra (̒a), grand ayatollah Javadi Amoli stated: The late shaykh al-Kulaynī narrates that when Amir al-Muʾminīn (ʿa) returned a second time to prepare the army for Ṣiffīn, he delivered a sermon, which is found in Nahj al-Balāghah. With regard to this sermon, shaykh al-Kulaynī writes that if all the jinn and humankind were gathered, so long as a divinely-sent prophet was not among them, they would never be able to produce such a sermon! You know that Shaykh al-Kulaynī is not one to exaggerate anything. He then says, “May my father and mother be sacrificed for him!” referring to Amir al-Muʾminīn (ʿa), and then explains his reasoning regarding this matter.

He then refers to a doubt cast by materialists and states: who else could have answered the materialists’ ancient doubt, which had persisted for centuries: those who, God forbid, deny the existence of God and the Resurrection, and who claim that matter is eternal?! They say: if you believers claim that God exists, then He must have created the world either ‘from something’ or ‘from nothing’ and that there is no third possibility.

They then argue that if He created it from something, then those particles existed prior to creation without God having created them, and God merely formed the world from them, thus implying that something existed independently of Him. But if He created the world from nothing, “nothing” is nonexistence, and nothing cannot produce something! This is because the negation of two contraries altogether is just as impossible as the coexistence of two contraries. So from what did God create the world?!

This ancient doubt regarding the eternal existence of the world had existed in all academies for thousands of years. Shaykh al-Kulaynī states that Ali ibn Abi Talib (ʿa) resolved it and then he quotes that statement. What I need to emphasize here is that, the very sentence that shaykh al-Kulaynī cited from this sermon by Amir al-Muʾminīn (ʿa), which provides the answer to that philosophical doubt, had already been spoken by the blessed Lady Fatimah (̒a) twenty-five years earlier in her sermon of al-Fadakiyyah. Now consider who the Lady Fatimah al-Zahra (̒a) truly was?!! Just think! She had delivered the Fadakiyyah sermon twenty-five years prior to the Battle of Ṣiffīn!

His eminence then continued: at the beginning of the Fadakiyyah sermon, the Lady Fatimah (̒a) states: “All praise belongs to God who created all things not from something.” What does this mean? It means: those who cast the above doubt must understand that the opposite of ‘from something’ is not ‘from nothing’, for both of these are affirmative forms. The true negation of ‘from something’ is ‘not from something’, not ‘from nothing’! Only one such as the Lady Fatimah (s) could truly comprehend this!

Present this same doubt to many people, even many scholars, and they will struggle to comprehend it, as indeed numerous scholars did in history struggled with it. Thus she says: “He created things not from something”, not “from nothing.” If it were ‘from something’, the said doubt would stand, implying the existence particles prior to the Act of creation. If it were ‘from nothing’, the doubt would again stand, for nonexistence cannot be gathered and shaped into a cosmos. But the opposite of ‘from something’ is not ‘from nothing’; it is ‘not from something’! “The negation of any thing is the negation of its affirmation.” This enlightening statement appeared in the sermon of the Lady Fatimah al-Zahra (̒a) twenty-five years before Amir al-Muʾminīn (ʿa) delivered his above-said sermon.