Original Arabic text
Published English translation
1. A number of our people have narrated from Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn ‘Isa from Muhammad Ibn Abi ‘Umayr from al-Husayn ibn Abu al-‘Ala’ who said the following: “I asked Abu ‘Abdallah (a.s.), ‘Can there be a time on earth without Imam?” The Imam said, “No, it can not be without an Imam.” I asked, “Can there be two Imams at a time?” He said, “No, unless one of them is silent.”
Narrator and transmission
See the transmission information preserved in the original source text.
Attributed scholarly assessments
Allamah Baqir al-Majlisi: حسن
Mirʾāt al-ʿUqūl fī Sharḥ Akhbār Āl al-Rasūl (2/294)
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: صحيح
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Kāfī, vol. 1, pp. 24, 25
Assessment transcribed from the source's named scholar and reference. No new grading or consensus is asserted; differing entries remain separate.
Source, rights, and attribution
- dataset Name
- Thaqalayn public library, via ThaqalaynAPI snapshot
- source Url
- https://thaqalayn.com/hadith/1/4/5/1
- 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
- 5d445d76569435e9f5d7ae5e5d893bccd4fb9c1a1bed207e6a2b0b69d63ae45c
- source File Hash
- 30bc491c96eb3860f3d3dfe97f46353a88858d7cb9e06d662ebdd04252ac5a3e
- original Source Url
- https://thaqalayn.net/hadith/1/4/5/1
- 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.