Original Arabic text
Published English translation
35. A number of our companions, from Abdillah al-Bazzaaz, from Muhammad bin 'Abd al-Rahman bin Hammaad, from al-Hasan bin 'Ammar that Abu ‘Abdillah (al-Sadiq) (as) in a long narration said, “The first, the beginning, the force and the structure of something is that without which something would be of no benefit. The thing that Allah has made beauty and light for His creatures, the people, is intelligence. With intelligence people come to know their creator and that they are created and that He is the one who has designed them and they are the ones who are being maintained. That it is the creator that is eternal and it is the creatures that are mortals. It is intelligence with which they reason from His creatures, like the heavens, the earth, and the sun the moon, night, the day. In this way they learned that they and the creatures have a creator and maintainer who is eternal. With intelligence they learn about good and bad and that darkness is in ignorance and light is in knowledge. These are facts that they learn with intelligence.” People asked the Imam (a.s), “Can intelligence only be enough for people?” The Imam (a.s) then replied, ‘With guidance from intelligence that Allah has made him to depend on and it is, his beauty and guide, a person of intelligence learns that Allah is his creator and that He is his Lord. Through intelligence one learns that his creator loves and that He dislikes certain things, that the Lord must be obeyed and that certain acts are disobedience to Him and that nothing but intelligence shows him all these facts. One also (with intelligence) learns that only with knowledge and searching one may reach the Creator. That one may not benefit from his intelligence if he can not learn the truth about Him through his knowledge. It then is necessary for a person of intelligence to acquire knowledge and proper moral discipline without which there is nothing else so dependable.”
Narrator and transmission
See the transmission information preserved in the original source text.
Attributed scholarly assessments
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/1/1/0/35
- 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
- 8bcb2f4a3dac48dde1ba116da2ba4d52e77552c70e9c582d1de8504774b85571
- source File Hash
- 30bc491c96eb3860f3d3dfe97f46353a88858d7cb9e06d662ebdd04252ac5a3e
- original Source Url
- https://thaqalayn.net/hadith/1/1/0/35
- 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.