Original Arabic text
Published English translation
4. Ali ibn Muhammad has narrated from certain persons of our people from Muhammad ibn al-Rayyan who has said the following “Al-Ma’mun did all he could to prove that abu Ja‘far, Muhammad ibn Ali al-Rida (a.s.) was only a young man of worldly desires. However Al-Ma’mun could not succeed. When he became frustrated he gave his daughter in marriage to abu Ja‘far, Muhammad ibn Ali al-Rida (a.s.). For the ceremony he sent two hundred most beautiful entertaining girls each with a bowl in her hand with a precious pearl in it to well come abu Ja‘far, Muhammad ibn Ali al-Rida (a.s.) when he would sit on the special seat prepared for him. They, however, were not of any attraction to the Imam (a.s.) to disturb him. There was a man called Mukhariq who had a voice, musical skills, a guitar and a tall beard. Al-Ma’mun called him and he said, “O Amir al-Mu’minin, if he is a worldly man I will prove myself as dealing him deadly blows on your behalf.” He sat in front of abu Ja‘far, Muhammad ibn Ali al-Rida (a.s.) and began to bray a hee-haw that made all the people of the house gather around him. He began to play his guitar and sing. He did it for an hour but abu Ja‘far (a.s.) did not pay any attention to the right or left. Then he (a.s.) raised his head and said, “O you, tall bearded one, be pious before Allah.” The narrator has said that the musical instrument and guitar fell off his hand and he could not use his hands thereafter until he died. When Al-Ma’mun asked him about his condition he said, “When abu Ja‘far (a.s.) expressed his disappointment at me it struck me with a huge degree of fear from which I have not been able to relieve myself ever since.”
Narrator and transmission
See the transmission information preserved in the original source text.
Attributed scholarly assessments
Allamah Baqir al-Majlisi: مرسل
Mirʾāt al-ʿUqūl fī Sharḥ Akhbār Āl al-Rasūl (6/101)
Assessment transcribed from the source's named scholar and reference. No new grading or consensus is asserted; differing entries remain separate.
Shaykh Baqir al-Behbudi: Catalogue non-inclusion note (not an authenticity grade)
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Kāfī
Source records non-inclusion in this scholar's selection; this is not itself a weak or authentic grade.
Source, rights, and attribution
- dataset Name
- Thaqalayn public library, via ThaqalaynAPI snapshot
- source Url
- https://thaqalayn.com/hadith/1/4/122/4
- license
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- edition
- Al-Kafi, volume 1, Thaqalayn digital edition / Muhammad Sarwar translation
- imported At
- 2026-10-18T21:36:12.871Z
- license Url
- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- rights Statement Url
- https://thaqalayn.com/terms
- attribution
- Source: Thaqalayn (Stichting Thaqalayn). Compiler: Shaykh Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Kulaynī. Translation: Muhammad Sarwar. Data transport: MohammedArab1/ThaqalaynAPI. No endorsement implied.
- translator
- Muhammad Sarwar
- source Revision
- becbad600b693ce23735d7403c4126ce7c896d34
- content Hash
- 0b66664f150cd31515efc3fc456bc21097064a75c3bcdc62c93e13c80da448ac
- source File Hash
- 30bc491c96eb3860f3d3dfe97f46353a88858d7cb9e06d662ebdd04252ac5a3e
- original Source Url
- https://thaqalayn.net/hadith/1/4/122/4
- changes
- Arabic and English texts preserved verbatim from pinned snapshot. Compiler introduction excluded where present; references mapped to fields; assessment whitespace trimmed; source-supplied English sanad retained separately. Search normalization is not applied to displayed text.
- verification Note
- Publisher content rights, translator attribution and structural checks, with independent publisher-page spot checks—not scholarly authentication or printed-edition collation. Historical text and scholarly reference strings may contain source errors; they are not silently corrected. No full commentary prose or inferred narrator identity is added. Muʿjam coverage, where present, is only the supplied excerpt, not the complete work.