Hadith collections / Muʿjam al-Aḥādīth al-Muʿtabara

Muʿjam al-Aḥādīth al-Muʿtabara · Hadith 6

The Book of Divine Unity · Negation of any Possibility of Seeing or Imagining God · Volume 1, book 4, chapter 3, Hadith 6

Original Arabic text

[325/6] الكافي: محمد بن يحيى، عن أحمد بن محمد، عن أبي هاشم الجعفري، عن أبي الحسن الرضا عليه السلام قال: سألته عن الله هل يوصف؟ فقال: أما تقرء القرآن؟ قلت: بلى قال: أما تقرء قوله تعالى: لَّا تُدْرِكُهُ الْأَبْصَارُ وَهُوَ يُدْرِكُ الْأَبْصَارَ؟ قلت: بلى، قال: فتعرفون الابصار؟ قلت: بلى، قال: ماهي؟ قلت: أبصار العيون، فقال: إن أوهام القلوب أكبر من أبصار العيون فهو لا تدركه الاوهام وهو يدرك الاوهام

Published English translation

6. [6/325] al-Kafi: Muhammad b. Yahya from Ahmad b. Muhammad from Abi Hashim al-Ja’fari from Abi al-Hasan al-Ridha عليه السلام. He (Abi Hashim) said: I asked him about Allah - can He be described? He said: Don’t you read the Qur’an? I said: Yes (I do). He said: Don’t you read His words the Elevated: “sights do not reach Him but He reaches the sights” (6:103)? I said: Yes (I do). He said: Do you know the sights (meant)? I said: Yes. He said: What are they? I said: The sighting of the eyes. He said: The imaginings of the heart are greater than the sighting of the eyes - thus He is such that imaginations do not reach Him while He reaches the imaginations.

Narrator and transmission

See the transmission information preserved in the original source text.

Attributed scholarly assessments

Shaykh Asif al-Mohseni: معتبر

Muʿjam al-Aḥādīth al-Muʿtabara

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/9/4/3/6
license
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
edition
Muʿjam al-Aḥādīth al-Muʿtabara, volume 1, Thaqalayn digital edition / Ammaar Muslim 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 Āṣif al-Muḥsinī. Translation: Ammaar Muslim. Data transport: MohammedArab1/ThaqalaynAPI. No endorsement implied.
translator
Ammaar Muslim
source Revision
becbad600b693ce23735d7403c4126ce7c896d34
content Hash
57bf6eaf51bd09510ebecdfc2bc3fe746349cde540723a77434cb93da886db9d
source File Hash
dd6ab8ed68633c092f938f895cc0a6428eecd77639bf5ce0087d6b592fc3aa79
original Source Url
https://thaqalayn.net/hadith/9/4/3/6
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.