Question:

Assalam u alayekum !
Shaykh Khalid Al Baghdadi (May Allah santify his secret ) memorized the books of Twelve Imams and he stayed in the school of isna ahriyaa.
Source: http://naqshbandi.org/chain/31.htm
And I read or heard in one of sohbats earlier this year that Shaykh Khalid Al Baghdadi QaddasAllahu sirrahu’l aziz ordered his murids to go to Makkah and do ba’yat of Syedna Al Mahdi Alaye he salam. Do these facts point out that Syedna Khalid Al Baghdadi was a follower of isna ashri school of thought and particularly his views about the appearance of Syedna Al Mahdi Alaye hi salam were those of isna ashri’s (because he ordered his murids to go there). It is to be noted that Maulana Jami wrote about the birth and disappearance of Syedna Al Mahdi Alaye hi salam in one of his books!

Answer:

wa `alaykum salam,
Ithna `Ashariyya books are not “the books of the Twelve Imams” but rather books compiled much later and containing many things they themselves never said.

It is possible Hadrat Mawlana Khalid (Allah sanctify his secret) may have memorized such books in order to refute them, as he was fluent in Persian as well as Arabic and he was extremely active in teaching the path of Ahl al-Sunna wal-Jama`a through his travels, books, teaching, sermons, and letters. Biographers and students of his said he became hugely famous as a brilliant debater against Ithna `Asharis in Tehran, Shiraz, Rayy, Asfahan, and elsewhere, and he always defeated them. Many times they ambushed him physically and tried to kill him. One of his poems in which he lambasted them is reproduced in full in al-Khani’s al-Hada’iq al-Wardiyya (transmitted from his grandfather directly from Mawlana Khalid) which is the main source Mawlana Shaykh Hisham (Allah sanctify his soul) used for the passage you quoted.

That same source also mentions that Mawlana Khalid’s teacher Hadrat Mawlana `Abd Allah al-Dihlawi (Allah sanctify his secret) “told him to meet the author of the Tuhfa Ithna `Ashariyya which is a unique sourcebook for the refutation of the Rawafid, the aged Shaykh Mawla `Abd al-`Aziz al-Hanafi al-Naqshbandi the son of Shaykh Waliyyullah.” He did meet Shah `Abd al-`Aziz and it is well-known he took ijaza from him. (In the early nineties Turkey’s Wakf Ihlas reproduced and distributed the Tuhfa Ithna `Ashariyya far and wide but it is reading for specialists of heresiology, not the common public.)

As for the passage that says “he stayed in the school of Ahsa’iyya Isfahaniyyah,” it was a Sunni school in Baghdad and not as suggested; many of Mawlana Khalid’s murids came from al-Ahsa’ and a few from Najd as well. In fact he transcends our Silsila and was one of the staunchest and most impressive Ahl al-Haqq in Islamic history, to the point they called him the Renewer (Mujaddid) of the 13th century.

And Allah knows best.

Hajj Gibril Haddad