Hadith collections / Muʿjam al-Aḥādīth al-Muʿtabara

Muʿjam al-Aḥādīth al-Muʿtabara · Hadith 8

The Book of Divine Unity · Negation of any Possibility of Seeing or Imagining God · Volume 1, book 4, chapter 3, Hadith 8

Original Arabic text

[327/8] التوحيد: ابن الوليد، عن الصفار، عن اليقطيني، عن ابن أبي نجران قال: سألت أبا جعفر الثاني عليه السلام عن التوحيد فقلت: أتوهم شيئا؟ فقال: نعم غير معقول ولا محدود، فما وقع وهمك عليه من شئ فهو خلافه، لا يشبهه شئ ولا تدركه الاوهام، كيف تدركه الاوهام وهو خلاف ما يعقل وخلاف ما يتصور في الاوهام؟ إنما يتوهم شئ غير معقول ولا محدود

Published English translation

8. [8/327] al-Tawhid: Ibn al-Walid from al-Saffar from al-Yaqtini from Ibn Abi Najran who said: I asked Aba Ja’far the Second عليه السلام about Tawhid saying: Should I imagine a thing (when conceiving of God)? He said: Yes, (something) neither cognisable nor delimited. Whatever your imagination falls upon is different than He. Nothing is like Him and imaginations do not reach Him. How can imaginations reach Him when He is other than what can be cognised and other than what is represented (image formed) in the imaginations? It is imagined something neither cognisable nor delimited.

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/9/4/3/8
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
e6a9a0207d7afc715a330fc93bf66908114cf87224fae0ab66e4fd3480d043db
source File Hash
dd6ab8ed68633c092f938f895cc0a6428eecd77639bf5ce0087d6b592fc3aa79
original Source Url
https://thaqalayn.net/hadith/9/4/3/8
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.