The Teaching of Raj’ah; A Self-evident Belief for Shi’a or A Proprietary of Shi’a?

The majority of Imamiyyah considers Raj’ah (lit. return of some dead to life) as a self-evident belief (Zaruri) of the Shi’a religion. In the contrary, the Sunnis deny it totally and criticize the Imami Shi’a for believing in this teaching. With Qur’anic and narrative arguments, the Shi’a explained the issue of Raj’ah and answered the misgivings. In this regard, some Imami scholars did not consider Raj’ah as self-evident belief for the religion and even some of them did not insist on the necessity of belief in it. It is completely apparent that expelling Raj’ah from the cycle of religion’s self-evident beliefs necessarily doesn’t mean the negation and denial of Raj’ah itself. After examining the arguments of self-evidence of Raj’ah offered by the Shi’a scholars and considering the arguments of some other Shi’i scholars in not being self-evident of this belief, this research resulted to this point that Raj’ah is not a self-evident belief of the Imamiyyah religion, but is proprietary of it. The final examination of this research shows that ignorance of changes and developments of the meanings of words, confusion between self-evident belief and proprietary belief, ignorance of document consensus (al-ijma’ al-madraki), supposition of accompaniment between certain narration (tawatur) and self-evidence and also supposition of accompaniment between fame and self-evidence are the most important factors that led to different views between the Imamiyyah scholars about the significance of the issue of Raj’ah.