Al-Kafi · Hadith 8

Original Arabic text

Published English translation

8. Muhammad ibn Yahya has narrated from Muhammad ibn al-Husayn from Safwan ibn Yahya from al-‘Ala’ ibn Razin from Muhammad ibn Muslim who has said the following. “I heard abu Ja’far (a.s.) saying, ‘Whoever would worship Allah in the expectation for reward and work hard but without having an Imam for himself his efforts would not be received acceptance. Such person is last and straying and Allah would dislike his deeds. The example of such person is like that of a lost sheep who would stray away from her herd. She would wonder around during the day and at nightfall she would see a different flock of sheep with a shepherd and she would glad and affectionately join it thinking it to be like her own flock. She would pass the night in their barn but in the morning when the shepherd let the flock out she could not recognize her flock and shepherd and begin to wonder in search for her own flock and shepherd and saw a flock and a shepherd. She then would rush to the flock with great interest but the shepherd shouted, ‘Go to your own flock and shepherd because you are lost and wondering.’ She then would run back and forth lost and wondering without a shepherd to show her the grazing areas and the barn. At such time a wolf would seize the opportunity and would kill her to eat. Just the same is the case, O Muhammad, those people of this ’Ummah (nation) who has no Imam from Allah, the Most Holy, the Most High, who is in public and possessing the noble quality of justice. Such people are lost and straying. If such people would in such a condition their death would be like that of an unbeliever and hypocrite. O Muhammad, take notice that the unjust Imams and their followers are far away from the religion of Allah. They have lost the right path and have mislead the others. The deeds that they are like dust blown away by the winds in a stormy day. They would remain helpless and unable to benefit from their deeds. Such is straying far away from the right path.”

Narrator and transmission

See the transmission information preserved in the original source text.

Attributed scholarly assessments

Source, rights, and attribution

dataset Name

Thaqalayn public library, via ThaqalaynAPI snapshot

source Url

https://thaqalayn.com/hadith/1/4/7/8

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

6ad7d607aa998c2566708d002bbe354d1abbe374178d8b77064a238578ca64eb

source File Hash

30bc491c96eb3860f3d3dfe97f46353a88858d7cb9e06d662ebdd04252ac5a3e

original Source Url

https://thaqalayn.net/hadith/1/4/7/8

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.