Original Arabic text
Published English translation
5. Ali ibn Muhammad has narrated from Sahl ibn Ziyad from Ja‘far ibn Muhammad ibn Hamzah who said: “I wrote to the man (the Imam) (as) saying: "Some of your followers have disagreed about the nature of knowledge. Some of them say that Allah has always been knowing before the creation of things, while others say that we should not say that Allah has always been knowing because "knows" implies "acts," and if we affirm knowledge, we are asserting the existence of something alongside Him in eternity. If you see fit, may Allah make me your ransom, please teach me something on this matter that I can firmly hold onto and not deviate from. He wrote in his own hand, "Allah has always been knowing. Blessed and exalted be His mention." (Allamah Al-Majlisi said: The response from Imam (as) was that He has always known, without addressing the fallacies in the argument against it, as they are too obvious to need elaboration.)
Narrator and transmission
See the transmission information preserved in the original source text.
Attributed scholarly assessments
Allamah Baqir al-Majlisi: ضعيف
Mirʾāt al-ʿUqūl fī Sharḥ Akhbār Āl al-Rasūl (11/2)
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/1/3/12/5
- 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
- 6f6dbc9b4da410e65b50924550c20224358cf0a8a185f2f80663c0d5cdc987b1
- source File Hash
- 30bc491c96eb3860f3d3dfe97f46353a88858d7cb9e06d662ebdd04252ac5a3e
- original Source Url
- https://thaqalayn.net/hadith/1/3/12/5
- 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.