Original Arabic text
Published English translation
4. Muhammad ibnYahya has narrated from Ahmad ibn Muhammad from Ali ibn al-Hakam from Sufyan ibn al-Simt who has said the following: “Once a man asked Abu ‘Abdillah (a.s.) ‘What is the difference between Islam and belief?’ The Imam then did not answer. Again he asked and the Imam did not answer. They then met each other on the road while the man was about to leave. Abu ‘Abd Allah (a.s.) said, ‘It seems as if you are about to leave.’ He said, ‘Yes, I am about to leave.’ The Imam then said, ‘Come home for a meeting.’ He met the Imam and asked him about Islam and belief and about the difference between the two. The Imam said, ‘Islam is what people have publicly accepted, such as that no one deserves to be worshipped except Allah, Who has no partners. That Muhammad (a.s.) is His servant and His Messenger, that it is obligatory to perform prayer, pay al-Zakat (charity), to perform Hajj of the House and fast in the month of Ramadan. This is Islam.’ The Imam (also) said, ‘Belief is recognition of this issue (that the Imam possesses Divine Authority). In such a condition, if one affirms the other principles of Islam but does not recognize this issue (that the Imam possesses Divine Authority) he is a Muslim but is lost.’”
Narrator and transmission
See the transmission information preserved in the original source text.
Attributed scholarly assessments
Allamah Baqir al-Majlisi: مجهول
Mirʾāt al-ʿUqūl fī Sharḥ Akhbār Āl al-Rasūl (7/125)
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/2/1/14/4
- license
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
- edition
- Al-Kafi, volume 2, 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
- b2e84c0e91bfa15bb7fba41f4c9061226c205e69b1220b4399c098732211da4e
- source File Hash
- d538c07d5f74e5fbc26b065897c076eab247d4d7c09e633fbb6184de9f37ee78
- original Source Url
- https://thaqalayn.net/hadith/1/1/14/4
- 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. Snapshot URL's erroneous volume 1 segment corrected to volume 2 using the reviewed file/book/volume metadata and publisher chapter structure; original URL retained for audit.
- 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.