Direct communication of nass by conferrer accepted: Plaintiff
Mumbai The plaintiff, while responding to queries of the Bombay high court on the issue of whether private nass was accepted as per Dawoodi Bohra tenets, submitted that though the defendant had refuted that private nass without witnesses was acceptable, there was the instance of the 50th Dai doing so in 1915
Mumbai The plaintiff, while responding to queries of the Bombay high court on the issue of whether private nass was accepted as per Dawoodi Bohra tenets, submitted that though the defendant had refuted that private nass without witnesses was acceptable, there was the instance of the 50th Dai doing so in 1915.
The plaintiffs’ counsel cited the private communication by the 50th Dai to the 51st Dai and said that though the 50th Dai had called two persons the previous night and told them of his intention, he had told the 51st Dai about his succession the next morning without any witnesses.
The court then clarified that it would not be considering instances of private nass without witnesses on Prophet Idris and Solomon, as the two nass was directly from Allah and were on a different footing from the nass by an Imam or Dai.
On the 36th day of the final hearing of the Syedna succession case, senior advocate Anand Desai for plaintiff Syedna Taher Fakhruddin was told by the single-judge bench of Justice Gautam Patel that there were some queries that he wanted the counsel to clarify regarding whether the plaintiff had completed his response to the defendant Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin’s counsel’s argument that a nass had to have witnesses.
Desai informed the bench that he had cited instances of the 13th Imam, the 8th Dai and the instances of the appointment of Prophet Idris and Solomon to drive home the point that the Bohra community had accepted the Imamate, Daiship and Prophethood though it was evident that the said appointees had announced their succession without there being any witnesses to corroborate their claims.
At this point, Justice Patel said that as the nass of Prophethood was different, it could not be considered as an instance, to which Desai agreed. The senior counsel then told the bench that he was citing a more recent example of private nass, one which was conferred on the 51st Dai by his predecessor. Desai informed the bench that though the defendant had said that only the communication to the two persons the previous night was considered nass, the 52nd Dai in his sermon had said that the morning communication by the 50th Dai was nass. He added that both the plaintiff and defendant agreed on nass being conferred in 1915 but the difference was whether the nass of night or day was a valid one.
Desai also brought up Syedna Sulayman bin Hasan’s claim of being the 27th Dai which was rejected because apart from there being no witnesses, he did not claim to be conferred nass directly by the 26th Dai. Desai informed the bench that while the defendant’s counsel had listed three reasons for the rejection of Syedna Sulayman’s claim, including production of an unwitnessed letter, the counsel had failed to mention that unlike the original plaintiff Syedna Khuzaima Qutbuddin, Syedna Sulayman did not claim to have been directly told of his appointment by the 26th Dai that he was the mansoos (second-in-command).
The original plaintiff has maintained in his suit that he was conferred nass privately by the 52nd Dai in December 1965 without any witnesses, and his evidence sufficed as there was no doctrinal compulsion to have two or more witnesses as canvassed by the defendant.
