Original Arabic text
Published English translation
Muhammad ibn Yahya and Ali ibn Ibrahim both have narrated from Ahmad Muhammad from Ali ibn al-Hakam and ‘Abd Allah ibn Yazid both from a man from Basra who said the following: “He asked (Imam) abu ‘Abd Allah (a.s.), about capability. The Imam said, ‘Can you do something before its existence?’ He Said, ‘No, I cannot do so.’ The Imam said, ‘Can you stop doing what has already been done?’ He said, ‘No, I cannot do so.’ The Imam then asked, ‘When then can you have the capability?’ He said, ‘I do not know.’ “The Imam said, ‘Allah created people and placed in them the means of capability and then He did not leave all matters in their hands. Thus, they are capable of acting at the time of the act with the act when they do that act. If they did not act the ‘Act’ in His property they do not have the capability to act the ‘Act’ that they did not act. Allah, the Most Holy, the Most High, is by far Majestic and above being opposed by someone in His property.’ “The man from Basra then said, ‘Are people, then, compelled?’ The Imam said, ‘Had they been compelled they would have been excused.’ The man said, ‘Are then all matters up to them?’ The Imam said, ‘No, all things are not left to them.’ The man said, ‘Then how is it’? “The Imam said, ‘Allah knew that they would act, thus He placed in them the means of capability. If they act at the time of action they are capable.’ The man from Basra then said, ‘I testify that this is the truth and that you are of the family of the Messenger (of Allah).’”
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 (2/215)
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/1/3/31/2
- 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
- 8954052db7447c2e17a89b5830041b7cab74ac6937e529bb27b0a52b289bc875
- source File Hash
- 30bc491c96eb3860f3d3dfe97f46353a88858d7cb9e06d662ebdd04252ac5a3e
- original Source Url
- https://thaqalayn.net/hadith/1/3/31/2
- 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.