Mujahid Mohammed said:
Actually it is stated in the Quran that Muhammed was the Seal. But it is stated in some hadith of the Messenger that he is the last of the Messengers. One is in Sahih muslim in the Book of Prayers where the messenger states he is the last. Do you have Sahih Muslim or access to it.
You cannot do this in Islam, we respect the opinions of the true ullamah and fuqahah
In the Baha`i writings the clergy has been stripped of authority BECAUSE the clergy is largely responsible for persecuting a new Messenger (the Sanhedrin and Jesus, for one instance).
In Persia at the time of the Bab and Baha`u'llah the clergy were concerned with years of study to master Arabic. The status of the levels ulemah seems to have been based on who had the largest turban or could utter the most incomrehensible and fulsome words in Arabic, the language that few of the masses could much understand. The ulemah based their status on the fact that they believed the political authorities of the time to be far beneath them in their level of acquired knowledge.
Adib Taherzadeh makes the following observation from The Revelation of Vaha`u'llah, volume 1:
"Although in this society it was the government officials who wielded authority, nevertheless, the all-powerful clergy looked down upon such men as inferior beings, unworthy to enter with them into the realms of knowledge and learning. Yet Bahá'u'lláh, on several occasions, expounded with simplicity and eloquence abstruse and mysterious traditions of Islam in the presence of divines, who were astonished at the depth of His knowledge and the profundity of His utterance.
The revelation of the Word of God has never been dependent on acquired knowledge. The Bearers of the Message of God in most cases were devoid of learning. Moses and Christ were not learned men. Muhammad was not educated, but when Divine Revelation came to Him, He uttered the words of God. Sometimes His utterances would be recorded on the spot by one of His disciples and sometimes the words would be memorized and recorded later. The Báb and Bahá'u'lláh had an elementary education, yet their knowledge, which was derived from God, was innate and encompassed the whole of mankind.
In one of His Tablets known as the Lawh-i-Hikmat (Tablet of Wisdom), which contains some of His noblest counsels and 21 exhortations concerning individual conduct, Bahá'u'lláh, in the course of expounding some of the basic beliefs of certain philosophers of ancient Greece, stated that He had entered no school and acquired no knowledge from men. Yet the knowledge of all that is, He asserted, was bestowed upon Him by the Almighty and recorded in the tablet of His heart, while His tongue was the one instrument capable of translating it into words.
In another Tablet Bahá'u'lláh revealed the source of His knowledge and the divine origin of His Mission in these words:
O King! I was but a man like others, asleep upon My
couch, when lo, the breezes of the All-Glorious were wafted
over Me, and taught Me the knowledge of all that hath been.
This thing is not from Me, but from One Who is Almighty
and All-Knowing.... This is but a leaf which the winds of
the will of thy Lord, the Almighty, the All-Praised, have
stirred.(1)
(Adib Taherzadeh, The Revelation of Baha'u'llah v 1, p. 20)
The clergy of His time was so corrupted, that Baha`u'llah stripped them of their authority. There is no clergy in the Baha`i Faith.
Regards,
Scott
