Hadith collections / Al-Kafi

Al-Kafi · Hadith 4

The Book on Virtue of Knowledge · Chapter on Kinds of People · Volume 1, book 2, chapter 3, Hadith 4

Original Arabic text

4ـ عَلِيُّ بْنُ إِبْرَاهِيمَ عَنْ مُحَمَّدِ بْنِ عِيسَى عَنْ يُونُسَ عَنْ جَمِيلٍ عَنْ أَبِي عَبْدِ الله (عَلَيْهِ السَّلام) قَالَ سَمِعْتُهُ يَقُولُ يَغْدُو النَّاسُ عَلَى ثَلاثَةِ أَصْنَافٍ عَالِمٍ وَمُتَعَلِّمٍ وَغُثَاءٍ فَنَحْنُ الْعُلَمَاءُ وَشِيعَتُنَا الْمُتَعَلِّمُونَ وَسَائِرُ النَّاسِ غُثَاءٌ.

Published English translation

4. Ali ibn Ibrahim has narrated from Muhammad ibn ‘Isa from Yunus from Jamil that he heard Abu 'Abdillah (al-Sadiq) (as) say: "People become of three groups: Scholars, students [of knowledge] and scum. We are the scholars, our Shi'a are the students and the rest of the people are scum."

Narrator and transmission

See the transmission information preserved in the original source text.

Attributed scholarly assessments

Allamah Baqir al-Majlisi: صحيح على الأظهر

Mirʾāt al-ʿUqūl fī Sharḥ Akhbār Āl al-Rasūl (1/111)

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/1/2/3/4
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
5935509ae51eb0bf7ebfec22d333df4844656de225003b6d343fbd48ba601dde
source File Hash
30bc491c96eb3860f3d3dfe97f46353a88858d7cb9e06d662ebdd04252ac5a3e
original Source Url
https://thaqalayn.net/hadith/1/2/3/4
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.