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Introduction

Muslims have narrated ḥadīths, discussed them, and commented on them since the 
early days of Islam. As Jonathan Brown has noted, “[O]n controversial issues from jihad 
and martyrdom to women’s rights under Islamic law, ḥadīths always provide key and often 
 
 
 
 
 

Hadīth as Common Discourse:  
Reflections on the Intersectarian Dissemination 

 of the Creation of the Intellect Tradition*

Pamela Klasova
Macalester College

(pklasova@macalester.edu)

* I would like to dedicate this article to Michael Cook. The Holberg seminar and all of its members have been 
an inspiration for me in my own development as a scholar. The friendships, fellowship, and collaboration that 
started there will, I hope, far outlive the last meeting. I thank the three anonymous reviewers who provided 
extensive feedback and Abdallah Soufan for his comments on an earlier draft.

.

Abstract
The ḥadīth about the creation of the Intellect has enjoyed a high status in the Shīʿī tradition and opens one of 
the four books of the Shīʿī ḥadīth canon, al-Kulaynī’s (d. 329/940) al-Kāfī. It appears also in many Sunnī works 
and has traveled among other Muslim groups, changing its meaning and form over time and generating several 
commentaries. Ḥadīths are usually studied in a jurisprudential context, as forming the basis for legal positions; 
in this article, I study the ḥadīth not as a legal text with a fixed meaning but as a literary text with a meaning 
that is changeable. First, I revisit previous scholarly views on the provenance of the ḥadīth. I argue that it first 
circulated in Basran society in the late second/eighth century as a popularized version of the Muʿtazilī tenet of 
obligation (taklīf) before being written down as a ḥadīth. I then follow its later journey among different groups 
in the medieval period as it changed forms and meanings and in the early modern period as it became the 
subject of commentaries by the Shīʿī philosopher Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1050/1640) and by the Sunnī scholar Murtaḍā 
al-Zabīdī (d. 1205/1791). The translation of the two commentaries can be found in the Appendix. The ḥadīth’s 
intersectarian dissemination and fluid nature make it an excellent case study for exploring the literary side 
of the ḥadīth genre, which served as common discourse for different Islamic sects and intellectual and social 
groups over the centuries. 

© 2020 Pamela Klasova. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 
License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and 
only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source.

mailto:pklasova%40macalester.edu?subject=


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determinative evidence.”1 This is how ḥadīths are usually seen: as the basis for Islamic 
law and the primary sources providing evidence for certain positions in Islam. This image 
carries with it the idea of unchangeability, connected to an immutable and atemporal legal 
tradition stretching from the early days of Islam until today. 

In this article, I will highlight a different face of ḥadīths—namely, their ability to adapt to 
new environments and change form and meaning. For this purpose, I will use the case study 
of a non-legal ḥadīth about the creation of the Intellect, which traveled over the course of 
more than a millennium from sect to sect, shifting in form, function, and meaning along the 
way. This ḥadīth offers an example of a tradition that functioned not as a basis of law but as 
a manifestation of ideas already circulating in society and as a vehicle of expression for new 
ideas when it traveled elsewhere.

Western ḥadīth scholarship has traditionally focused on issues of dating and 
authentication, but more recently scholars have explored the literary aspects of the 
ḥadīth genre. Sebastian Günther, for instance, has applied modern literary theory to these 
traditions and identified some of their fictional elements, such as their ability to reflect the 
sociocultural world in which they arose and the creativity of the transmitters who gave 
them their form by selecting, omitting, replacing, and adding material at their disposal.2 
The growing interest in the agency of later compilers who used ḥadīths to participate in 
the discourses of their time has also driven scholars to look at ḥadīth more as a literary 
practice. Stephen R. Burge has observed the “tense relationship between the ḥadīth 
compilation that is rooted in the temporality of the real world, whilst simultaneously 
being rooted in the atemporal abstract ‘ḥadīth literature,’”3 and he argues for reading 
ḥadīth collections as literary works.4 Another way to understand how ḥadīths participated 
in later discourses is to study ḥadīth commentaries, as Joel Blecher has done in his recent 
book. Blecher observes that “one set of questions has yet to be fully investigated: How 
did Muslims interpret and reinterpret the meanings of hadith and hadith collections?. . . 
When the needs of interpreters’ social interests came into conflict with their fidelity to 
the apparent meanings of the hadith, how did commentators attempt to thread the needle, 
balancing both sets of concerns?”5 In this article, I also explore the ḥadīth genre’s literary 
possibilities and its participation in temporal debates, but I do so through the study of a 
single ḥadīth, taking a longue durée approach to it. In the first part of the article, I revisit 
previous scholarly views on the origins of the ḥadīth, which describes the divine creation 

1.  J. A. C. Brown, Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World (London: Oneworld, 2009), 
267.

2.  S. Günther, “Modern Literary Theory Applied to Classical Arabic Texts: Ḥadīth Revisited,” in The Hadith, 
ed. M. Shah, 4:28–33 (London: Routledge, 2010). See also the other studies dealing with the literariness of the 
ḥadīth genre in this volume. 

3.  S. R. Burge, “The ‘Ḥadīṯ Literature’: What Is It and Where Is It?,” Arabica 65, no. 1/2 (2018): 64–83, at 81. 
4.  S. R. Burge, “Myth, Meaning and the Order of Words: Reading Hadith Collections with Northrop Frye and 

the Development of Compilation Criticism,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 27, no. 2 (2016): 213–28, at 
213. 

5.  J. Blecher, Said the Prophet of God: Hadith Commentary across a Millennium (Oakland: University of 
California Press, 2018), 2. 



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of the Intellect. I propose that it emerged as a popular reformulation of a Muʿtazilī tenet 
in the second/eighth-century Basra, from where it spread among Sunnī and Shīʿī circles.6  
The origin and early dissemination of the ḥadīth illustrate the porousness of the boundaries 
between these groups, which all dealt with the same material. In the second part of the 
article, I follow the ḥadīth’s later journey. I choose three medieval variants that circulated 
in different Muʿtazilī and Shīʿī circles to illustrate the different types of treatment that the 
ḥadīth received. The ḥadīth’s changing forms and meanings show that even after the ahl 
al-ḥadīth monopolized the ḥadīth enterprise, other groups were still using ḥadīth material 
to express and negotiate their ideas about the world. Finally, I discuss two examples of 
early medieval commentaries on the ḥadīth, one by the Shīʿī philosopher Mullā Ṣadrā  
(d. 1050/1640) and by the Sunnī scholar Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī (d. 1205/1791). These 
commentaries reveal that even after the ḥadīth (and its variants) could no longer be altered, 
it continued to spark ideas and to be reinterpreted in order to befit the two thinkers’ 
worldviews. Thus, this case study seeks to highlight that ḥadīths functioned over centuries 
as a common, intersectarian discourse among different groups of the Islamic society.  
The existence of this common discourse opens a window onto a world in which the 
boundaries between sects and intellectual traditions were not set in stone. 

At the end of the article, I include the translation of Mullā Ṣadrā’s and al-Zabīdī’s texts 
as a sample of the genre of ḥadīth commentary. From a different perspective, the Appendix 
could be seen as the core of the article, and the study of the Intellect ḥadīth as an extended 
introduction to it.

1. The Muʿtazilī Origins of the Ḥadīth

The ḥadīth under study talks about the creation of the Intellect (ʿaql) and about the 
Intellect’s obedience to God. It opens one of the four books of the Shīʿī ḥadīth canon, al-Kāfī 
(“The sufficient book”) by Shaykh al-Kulaynī:7 

When God created the Intellect, He made it speak and then He told it: “Come forward!” 
And it came forward. Then He told it: “Go back!” And it went back. Then He said: “By 
My Might and by My Glory, I have not created a creature dearer to Me than you are. I 
perfected you only in those I love. It is you whom I order, it is you whom I forbid, it is 
you whom I punish, and it is you whom I reward.”8 

Lammā khalaqa Allāhu al-ʿaqla istanṭaqahu. Thumma qāla lahu: “Aqbil!” fa-aqbala. 
Thumma qāla lahu: “Adbir!” fa-adbara. Thumma qāla lahu: “Wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī mā 

6. The use of the terms “Sunnī” and “Shīʿī” for this early period may be misleading because the groups’ 
identities had not yet been fully formed. As a result, some scholars have opted for the terms “proto-Sunnī” and 
“proto-Shīʿī.” For a nuanced discussion of the terminology see M. Dann, “Contested Boundaries: The Reception 
of Shīʿite Narrators in the Sunnī Ḥadīth Tradition,” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2015), 5–16.

7.  A Hijri date usually spans two consecutive years in the Gregorian calendar. Since many death dates in 
the first centuries of Islam are not entirely certain anyway, I will give only one Gregorian equivalent for each, 
corresponding to the Hijri year in the month of Muḥarram. 

8.  Throughout the article, ḥadīth texts are written in bold. 



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khalaqtu khalqan huwa aḥabbu ilayya minka. Wa-lā ukammiluka illā fī-man uḥibbu. 
Amā innī iyyāka āmuru wa-iyyāka anhī wa-iyyāka uʿāqibu wa-iyyāka uthību.”9

The ḥadīth’s prominent position in al-Kulaynī’s compilation mirrors the prominent place 
that it has held in the Shīʿī tradition. It is followed by thirty-three other reports united by 
the theme of ʿaql, which include some of the ḥadīth’s variants. The ḥadīth is recorded with 
almost10 unblemished chains of transmission (isnāds) to the imams Muḥammad al-Bāqir 
(d. 114/732) and Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765). Sunnī critics have considered it weak, but 
it is nonetheless recorded in numerous Sunnī compilations with many different isnāds. 
Furthermore, the ḥadīth has also found its way to Ṣūfī circles. It constitutes, for instance, 
an important piece of evidence in Ibn ʿArabī’s (d. 638/1240) theosophical Ṣūfism.11  
By contrast, the theologian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) considered the ḥadīth the epitome 
of a broader conspiracy against Islam that in his eyes was led by the Shīʿīs, the Ṣūfīs, and the 
philosophers alike. In the early modern period, two prominent Islamic thinkers analyzed 
the ḥadīth closely in their commentaries: the Iranian Shīʿī philosopher and theologian 
Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1050/1640) and the Indian Sunnī humanist and polymath Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī 
(d. 1205/1791). A translation of the two commentary texts, which display the authors’ 
creative incorporation of their Ṣūfī and theosophical ideas, is presented in the appendix to 
this article.

In modern scholarship, Ignaz Goldziher observed the ḥadīth’s importance for esoteric 
Islamic thought and interpreted it as a Neoplatonic teaching about emanation in the form 
of a prophetic saying.12 He noted that the ḥadīth reflects the belief that the Intellect is the 
first and immediate emanation from the primordial existence, a divine substance that links 
God’s transcendence, from which all things emanate, with the corporeal reality of this 
world.13 

Douglas S. Crow, in his 1996 dissertation, which centers on this ḥadīth, rejected 
Goldziher’s interpretation in favor of a native Islamic context.14 Having argued that Goldziher 
incorrectly based his interpretation on a later version of the ḥadīth that emphasizes the idea 
of the Intellect as the first creation,15 Crow placed the origins of the ḥadīth in the context of 

9.  Al-Kulaynī, Uṣūl al-Kāfī (Beirut: Manshūrāt al-Fajr, 2007), 1:5, no. 1. Al-Kulaynī took this tradition from 
al-Barqī, al-Maḥāsin, ed. M. al-Rajāʾī (Qum: Majmaʿ al-ʿĀlamī li-Ahl al-Bayt, 2011), 1: 306, no. 604. I transliterate 
Arabic texts on the basis of how they are written (including vowels), not how they are pronounced. 

10.  To my knowledge, there is one weak transmitter in the Shīʿī isnāds, Sahl b. Ziyād, and one isnād recorded 
by al-Ṣaddūq that is questionable. He includes this variant among the nawādir (rare variants), and many of the 
transmitters in the isnād are unknown. See nos. 16 and 17 in Shīʿī variants below. 

11.  Brown, Hadith, 194. 
12.  I. Goldziher, “Neuplatonische und gnostische Elemente im Ḥadīṯ,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und 

verwandte Gebiete 22 (1908): 317–44, at 318–20. 
13.  Or better yet, intellects. For instance, the philosopher al-Fārābī (d. 339/950), following earlier Neoplatonic 

ideas, designed a complex scheme in which ten intellects emanate from the Necessary Being. The lowest of 
them connects with the sublunar realm.

14.  D. S. Crow, “The Role of al-ʿAql in Early Islamic Wisdom with Reference to Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq” (PhD 
diss., McGill University, 1996).

15.  The version of the ḥadīth that Goldziher considered primary differs from the version above. What 



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the first/seventh-century polemics between predestinarians (jabriyya) and the proponents 
of human free will (qadariyya).16 He suggested that the ḥadīth echoed pre-Islamic wisdom 
material as well as Qurʾānic and Biblical elements.17 This argument seems to be driven by 
the old debate over whether the Islamic intellectual tradition was formed through external 
influences or internal developments. 

Differing with both Goldziher and Crow, I argue for a Muʿtazilī origin for the ḥadīth. 
More precisely, I argue that the ḥadīth emerged in the early second/eighth century in 
Basra as a popular saying communicating to broader audiences the doctrine of obligation 
(taklīf), which was essential to the Muʿtazilī belief system. This placing of the ḥadīth is most 
interesting because it brings us to the Basran beginnings of the Muʿtazila in the generation 
of its founders, such as Wāṣil b. ʿAṭāʾ (d. 131/748) and ʿAmr b. ʿUbayd (d. 144/761), who 
first formulated these core Muʿtazilī ideas in their public debates. The ḥadīth should 
be understood as an echo of these debates from a time long before the first systematic 
Muʿtazilī theologian Abū al-Hudhayl al-ʿAllāf (d. between 226/840 and 235/849) wrote his 
treatises; as part of a public oral culture, which existed alongside the traditionist circles and 
in which ideas were exchanged and shared by people from different sects and social groups, 
including Muʿtazilīs, Shīʿīs, Sunnīs, and Ṣūfīs. 

Before I begin to furnish my claim with evidence, I should make my method and 
assumptions clear. I limited the texts studied in this part to the ḥadīth’s variants recorded 
in the early sources—up to the fourth/tenth century—and to those with isnāds.18 This does 
not mean that I consider variants appearing only in later collections forged, but I needed 
to sift through the sources to produce a dataset of texts (matns) and isnāds that we can   

concerns us here is the beginning, which reads “The first thing that God created was the Intellect” (awwalu 
mā khalaqa Allāhu al-ʿaqlu) instead of “When God created the Intellect” (lammā khalaqa Allāhu al-ʿaqla). See 
Goldziher, “Neuplatonische und gnostische Elemente,” 318. Although a small difference, it prompted significant 
conclusions. In Goldziher’s scenario, ahl al-sunna altered the beginning of the ḥadīth to express a more neutral 
position focused on the creation of the Intellect, not on the first creation of all. Crow has reversed Goldziher’s 
periodization of the two main variants, arguing that the neutral lammā version is the original one because it is 
found in most of the early texts containing the ḥadīth. Crow, “Role of al-ʿAql,” 3. 
      16.  A classic study of the qadar debate is W. M. Watt, Free Will and Predestination (London: Luzac, 1948). Crow 
has also pointed to a connection with “the first-century views on the divine parceling out of the ʿuqūl,” which 
hold that God has distributed ʿaql to humans in different measures (tafāḍul), and he quotes a saying ascribed 
to Muʿāwiya b. Qurra al-Muzanī (d. 113/731) to illustrate this belief: “People perform good [deeds]; however, 
they receive their recompense on Resurrection Day in proportion to the measure of their intelligence (ʿaql).” 
See Crow, “Role of al-ʿAql,” 8–9. It is important, however, to distinguish between ʿaql as an autonomous entity 
that acts and speaks (the Intellect), as the ḥadīth conceives of it, and ʿaql as the human faculty of intelligence or 
reason, as it is treated in al-Muzanī’s tradition. 

17.  Crow refers to a report by Wahb b. Munabbih that speaks of God’s adorning his rule with ʿaql, on the 
theme of the rejection and vindication of God’s wisdom in the Bible (Crow, “Role of al-ʿAql,” xxiv, n. 11), and 
of “pre-creation Wisdom (hokmah & sophia & Iranian xrad)” (p. xxv). He also references (at 39, n. 7) other 
scholars who have considered the ḥadīth to be inspired by Biblical wisdom literature: I. Eisenberg, “Die 
Prophetenlegenden des Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh al-Kisāʾī” (PhD diss., University of Bern, 1898), xx f., and T. 
Fahd, “La naissance du monde selon l’Islam,” Sources Orientales 1 (1959): 237–77, at 264.

18.  I did not duplicate identical variants.



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assume with some confidence to have circulated in the early period.19 I then identified the 
regional affiliations of the transmitters. As Behnam Sadeghi has noted, regionalism is a 
prominent feature of early traditions and can be used for dating purposes, and this is also 
true in the case of this ḥadīth.20 Three assumptions underpin my discussion. First, I consider 
the main intention of the ḥadīth to be an important signpost of its intellectual context. By 
main intention I mean the core message that the ḥadīth conveys in its most basic form.21 
Second, I assume that medieval ḥadīth criticism (the biographical rijāl works) contains 
some historical information about the transmitters. In other words, I do not believe that the 
critics inferred all their information retrospectively from the ḥadīths. And third, I assume 
that like the rijāl works, the isnāds—even single strands22—were generated during the 
transmission process more often than they were forged. When tracing the ḥadīth’s isnāds, I 
have drawn on Crow’s painstaking work, with the difference that I put less emphasis on the 
ascriptions to the earliest famous narrators and look with more confidence to the following 
two generations.23

Based on my first assumption, I do not find Crow’s hypothesis that the ḥadīth emerged in 
debates about predestination (qadar) convincing. Let us examine the ḥadīth’s content more 
closely, this time in its simplest variant, which appears in ʿAbd Allāh b. Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal’s 
(d. 290/903) Zawāʾid (“Additions”) to his father’s Kitāb al-Zuhd: “When God created the 
Intellect, He told it: ‘Come forward!’ And it came forward. Then He told it: ‘Go back!’ And 
it went back. So He said: ‘I have not created a creature dearer to Me than you are. Through 
you I take and through you I give.’”24

A closer look at the text of the ḥadīth shows that the qadarī position cannot be the main 
intention of the ḥadīth. The qadar debate was among the first major controversies in Islamic 

19.  Of course, we can never be entirely certain about that, for even the third/ninth- and fourth/tenth-
century works have been generally preserved in later manuscripts. 

20.  B. Sadeghi, “The Traveling Tradition Test: A Method for Dating Traditions,” Der Islam 85, no. 1 (2010): 
203–42, at 204.

21.  By most basic form, I mean the parts of the ḥadīth that can be found in most of its versions. Intention, 
which implies authorship, may seem incompatible with the oral aspects of the ḥadīth’s emergence; however, 
this is not necessarily the case. Umberto Eco, for instance, has theorized an intention of art that is public and 
not in the head of the author. D. Compagno, “Theories of Authorship and Intention in the Twentieth Century: 
An Overview,” Journal of Early Modern Studies 1, no. 1 (2012): 37–53, at 49. 

22.  Single-strand isnāds are isnāds that do not cross others. According to Juynboll, such isnāds should be 
suspected of being fabrications. See H. Motzki, “Dating Muslim Traditions: A Survey,” Arabica 52, no. 2 (2005): 
204–53, at 224.

23.  Crow takes the presence in the isnāds of first/seventh-century figures such as Kurayb (the mawlā of 
Ibn ʿAbbās) or al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. ca. 110/729) as historical data and their qadarī loyalties as evidence of the 
ḥadīth’s qadarī origins. This is rather problematic, for these figures attained a semilegendary aura and appeal. 
See, for example, S. Mourad, Early Islam between Myth and History: Al-Hasan al-Basri (d. 110 H/728 CE) and the 
Formation of His Legacy in Classical lslamic Scholarship (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 243. The members of the generation 
of narrators after them, by contrast, are much more marginal figures, which inspires more confidence since 
later transmitters have little reason to ascribe the ḥadīth to them. 

24.  Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, Kitāb al-Zuhd, with the Zawāʾid of his son ʿAbd Allāh b. Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, ed. Ḥ. 
al-Basyūnī (Cairo: Dār al-Ḥadīth, 2004), 372, no. 1872. For the transliteration, see the section Sunnī isnāds and 
matns below.



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theology (kalām).25 The proponents of free will (qadarīs) asked how God could reward and 
punish people in the afterlife for their deeds if those deeds had already been predestined, 
and they concluded that it was necessary for humans to have free will. Although the ḥadīth 
under study does imply that human acts have intrinsic value (good or evil), it does not 
present the Intellect as having free will. It can lead to asserting the necessity of free will, 
but that requires an external premise and a few more logical steps; see Figure 1.

Figure 1. The connection between the ḥadīth and the argument for free will.

Since these steps are not self-evident in the text of the ḥadīth, free will could hardly be 
the ḥadīth’s primary intention. That being said, the ḥadīth circulated widely and different 
people appropriated it for their own purposes, and it undoubtedly also entered the qadarī-
jabrī controversy in the course of its journey.26 But because the ḥadīth is not primarily 
about free will, it is unlikely that this debate was the context in which it emerged. 

25.  For a succinct discussion of the debate and the controversies that surround it in modern scholarship, 
see A. Treiger, “Origins of Kalām,” in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology, ed. Sabine Schmidtke, 27–43 
 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). For a crucial scholarly work on the debate, see, for instance, M. A. Cook, 
Early Muslim Dogma: A Source-Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 

26.  Although Crow deems most versions of the ḥadīth to express qadarī views, he also identifies a few that 
expound the opposite predestinarian/jabrī position. See, for example, Crow, “Role of al-ʿAql,” 12–13.

The Intellect acts in accordance 
with God's will; the Intellect can 

distinguish between good and evil 

Therefore, humans have  
intrinsic value (good or evil)

Some evil acts exist

Therefore, human beings  
can choose evil of their own will  

( = they have free will)

God cannot be the source  
of evil acts (external premise of the 

qadariyya and the Muʿtazila)



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The ḥadīth is about ʿaql being a parameter for distinguishing between good and evil. 
The group most famously connected with ʿaql was the Muʿtazila, who emerged from qadarī 
circles. They were proponents of rationalistic ethics and moral objectivism and the first ones 
to articulate a coherent system of religious moral theology, which, I contend, is reflected in 
this ḥadīth. The Muʿtazila believed that human acts have intrinsic values that can be known 
through reason, a doctrine that came to be known as al-taḥsīn wa-l-taqbīḥ al-ʿaqliyyān 
(“establishing good and evil through reason”). Because God is necessarily good and just, 
human reason and divine revelation both guide humans toward the same goal. As such, 
they are in harmony and do not contradict each other. This doctrine is reflected in the first 
point made in the ḥadīth on the creation of the Intellect, which states that ʿaql is absolutely 
obedient, acts only in accordance with God’s will, and reaches conclusions about good and 
evil that accord with God’s justice. Therefore, it is the creation dearest to God. 

Being able to distinguish good from evil through reason is one thing; being obliged to 
act on this knowledge is another. The latter thus needs to be stated separately, yielding 
the second point of the ḥadīth, expressed in the last sentence, “Through you I take and 
through you I give.” It means that reason is the locus of obligation (al-ʿaql manāṭ al-taklīf). 
The Muʿtazila conceived of a causal connection between one’s conduct in this world and 
one’s reward or punishment in the hereafter. They believed that God imposed obligation 
(taklīf) on human beings to benefit them by giving them the opportunity to attain reward.27 
One of the early Muʿtazilī theologians, Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāʾī (d. 303/915), defines the value 
of human acts according to whether they merit reward or punishment.28 The doctrine of 
taklīf, with the prominent place it gives to ʿaql, lay at the heart of Muʿtazilī teachings for 
as long as we are aware. Already the first systematic Muʿtazilī philosopher whose teachings 
are known to us, Abū al-Hudhayl al-ʿAllāf, held that one is “under obligation due to reason 
(ʿaql) to know God beyond any doubt” even if one has not yet received revelation, and that 
one “is also duty bound to know the goodness of the good and the evil of the evil, with the 
consequent obligation of pursuing the good, such as truth and justice, and avoiding the 
evil, such as lying and injustice.”29 Reason (ʿaql) is therefore the tool of both knowledge 
and punishment, because it is by means of knowledge that the human subject is liable to 
punishment. The ḥadīth encapsulates these beliefs, albeit in a much more rudimentary 
form, and attests to their existence long before Abū al-Hudhayl wrote down his teachings in 
early second/eighth-century Basra. 

Let us next move to the isnāds of the ḥadīth, which identify the time and place of its 
emergence and early circulation. The first thing that stands out when we look at the lists of 
Sunnī and Shīʿī isnāds and matns of the ḥadīth and at charts 1 and 2, which represent them 
graphically, is that the two charts do not show a single common transmitter between the 

27.  S. Vasalou, Moral Agents and Their Deserts: The Character of Muʿtazilite Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton 
University Press, 2008), 32. This obligation can be either rationally known (taklīf ʿaqlī) or known through 
revelation (taklīf samʿī). For the relationship between the two, see chapter 3 in Vasalou, Moral Agents, 38–66. 

28.  “The evil [act] is that for which, taken in isolation, one deserves blame.” G. F. Hourani, Islamic Rationalism: 
The Ethics of ʿAbd Al-Jabbār (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 49. Vasalou’s book revolves around the Muʿtazilī 
conceptions of desert.

29.  Al-Shahrastānī, Muslim Sects and Divisions, trans. A. K. Kazi and J. G. Flynn (London: Routledge, 1984), 47. 



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two traditions. In this case, then, what has not been recorded of its transmitters is almost 
as important as what has. The absence of shared transmitters begs for explanation, because 
it is not plausible that the ḥadīth emerged and developed completely independently in the 
two traditions. The Muʿtazilī scenario will provide the link. 

The Sunnī variants speak to the earlier circulation of the ḥadīth, and I will therefore 
start with them and then move to the Shīʿī variants. The cities with which the transmitters 
were affiliated according to rijāl works are my guiding tool, along with the transmitters’ 
approximate lifetimes. Therefore, in the list of Sunnī isnāds and matns that follows, I 
include the places where narrators lived and, when known, their death dates (but I omit 
them on subsequent mentions of the same person). On the whole, these early variants 
closely resemble each other and the basic version quoted above, with some minor additions 
here and there.30

Sunnī variants (isnāds and matns)

1. Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. 290/903): 31ʿAlī b. Muslim al-Ṭūsī (d. 253/867, Baghdad)—Sayyār 
b. Ḥātim al-ʿAnazī (d. 199 or 200/815, Basra)—Jaʿfar b. Sulaymān al-Ḍubaʿī (d. 178/794, 
Basra)—Mālik b. Dīnār (d. 127/745, Basra)—al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 110/728, Basra), 
marfūʿ32

Lammā khalaqa Allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “Aqbil!” fa-aqbala. Thumma qāla lahu: 
“Adbir!” fa-adbara. Fa-qāla “Mā khalaqtu khalqan aḥabba ilayya minka. Bika ākhudhu 
wa-bika uʿṭī.”

2. Abū Jaʿfar al-ʿUqaylī (d. 322/933, Mecca):33 Aḥmad b. Dāwūd al-Qūmsī (d. 295/907, 
Baghdad)—Abū Hammām (= al-Walīd b. Shujjāʿ, d. 243/857, Kufa, Baghdad)—Saʿīd 
b. al-Faḍl al-Qurashī (d. ca. 200/815, Basra, Damascus, munkar al-ḥadīth)—ʿUmar 
b.  Abī Ṣāliḥ al-ʿAtakī (majhūl, munkar al-ḥadīth)—Abū Ghālib (Basra)—Abū Umāma 
(d. 81/700, Hijaz, Syria)—the Prophet 

Lammā khalaqa Allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “Aqbil!” fa-aqbala. Thumma qāla lahu: 
“Adbir!” fa-adbara. Thumma qāla: “Wa-ʿizzatī mā khalaqtu khalqan huwa aʿjabu 
ilayya minka. Bika ākhudhu wa-bika uʿṭī wa-laka al-thawābu wa-ʿalayka al-ʿiqābu.” 

30.  I have organized the variants based on common traits that they show. Variants 1-5 all show the basic 
form of the ḥadīth (similar to the one recorded by Ibn Ḥanbal) on occasion with some minor additions; the rest 
include additional orders that God addresses to the Intellect. Variants 6 and 7, for example, both include the 
order “qum!” “stand up!” and variants 8 and 9 expand on the divine orders with “uqʿud!” “sit down!” “unṭuq!” 
“speak!” “uṣmut!” “be quiet!”. Some of the variants also emphasize the warning in the last part of the ḥadīth by 
inserting the expression “iyyāka” “beware,” similarly to the variant found in al-Kāfi.

31.  Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, Kitāb al-Zuhd, with the Zawāʾid of his son ʿAbd Allāh b. Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, ed. Ḥ. 
al-Basyūnī (Cairo: Dār al-Ḥadīth, 2004), 372, no. 1872. 

32.  This is the one isnād that al-Zabīdī considers sound. See Appendix, n. 163. 
33.  Abū Jaʿfar al-ʿUqaylī, Kitāb al-Ḍuʿafāʾ, ed. ʿA. A. Qalʿajī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1984), 3:175, no. 

1169.



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3. Al-Ṭabarānī (d. 360/971):34 Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā b. Manda al-Iṣbahānī (d. 301/913, 
Isfahan, Basra, Kufa)—Abū Hammām al-Walīd b. Shujjāʿ (d. 243/857, Kufa, Baghdad)—
Saʿīd b. al-Faḍl al-Qurashī (munkar al-ḥadīth)—ʿUmar b. Abī al-Ṣāliḥ al-ʿAtakī (majhūl, 
munkar al-ḥadīth)—Abū Ghālib—Abū Umāma—the Prophet

Lammā khalaqa Allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla la-hu: “Aqbil!” fa-aqbala. Thumma qāla lahu: 
“Adbir!” fa-adbara. Qāla: “Wa-ʿizzatī mā khalaqtu khalqan aʿjabu ilayya minka. Bika 
uʿṭī wa-bika al-thawābu wa-ʿalayka al-ʿiqābu.” 

4. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā (d. 281/894):35 Muḥammad b. Bakkār (d. 238/852, Baghdad, Ruṣāfa)—
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Abī al-Zinād (d. 174/790, Medina, Baghdad)—Muḥammad b. ʿUqba 
(mawlā of Zubayr, Medina)—Kurayb (d. 98/716, mawlā of Ibn ʿAbbās, Hijaz, possibly 
Basra)

Lammā khalaqa Allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “Aqbil!” fa-aqbala. Thumma qāla lahu: 
“Adbir!” fa-adbara. Qāla—wa-huwa aʿlamu bihi—“Wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī lā ajʿaluka illā 
fīman uḥibbu wa-mā khalaqtu shayʾan huwa aḥabbu ilayya minka.”

5. Al-Ḥusayn b. Ziyād—Abū Ismāʿīl al-Azdī:36 al-Ḥusayn b. Ziyād—Abū Ismāʿīl Muḥammad 
b. ʿAbd Allāh (= “author” of the book, Basra)—Abū Jahḍam al-Azdī (Syria, Basra)—
Sufyān b. Sulaym (Syria, Wasit, overseeing police squads in Basra under al-Ḥajjāj in 
93/711)—al-Ḥārith b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Azdī (appointed governor of Basra in 45/665)

[Qāla lanā nabiyyunā ṣallā Allāhu ʿalayhi anna] Allāha lammā khalaqa al-ʿaqla 
fa-qaddarahu wa-ʿawarrahu wa-faragha min khalqihi qāla lahu: “Aqbil!” fa-aqbala. 
Thumma qāla lahu: “Adbir!” fa-adbara. Thumma qāla: “Wa-ʿizzatī mā khalaqtu min 
khalqī shayʾan huwa aḥabbu ilayya minka. Bika uḥmadu wa-bika uʿbadu wa-bika 
uʿrafu wa-bika tanālu ṭāqatī wa-bika tudkhalu jannatī. 

6. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā:37 Muḥammad b. Bakkār—Ḥafṣ b. ʿUmar (qāḍī of Aleppo, munkar 
al-ḥadīth)—al-Faḍl b. ʿĪsā al-Raqāshī (d. 132/749, Basra, wāʿiẓ, qadar, munkar 
al-ḥadīth)—Abū ʿUthmān al-Nahdī (d. 95/713, lived 130 years)—Abū Hurayra  
(d. 59/678)—the Prophet 

Lammā khalaqa Allāhu taʿālā al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “Qum!” fa-qām. Thumma qāla lahu: 
“Adbir!” fa-adbara. Thumma qāla lahu: “Aqbil!” fa-aqbala. Thumma qāla lahu: 
“Uqʿud!” fa-qaʿada. Fa-qāla Allāhu ʿazza wa-jalla: “Mā khalaqtu khalqan khayran 
minka wa-lā akrama minka wa-lā-afḍala minka wa-lā aḥsana minka. Bika ākhudhu 
 

34.  Al-Ṭabarānī, al-Muʿjam al-kabīr, ed. Ḥ. ʿA. al-Salafī (Cairo: Maktabat Ibn Taymiyya, 1983), 8:339–40, no. 
8086.

35.  Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, al-ʿAql wa-faḍluhu, ed. L. M. al-Ṣaghīr and N. ʿA. Khalaf (Riyadh: Dār al-Rāya, 1989), 
40–41, no. 16.

36.  Abū Ismāʿīl al-Azdī, Kitāb Futūḥ al-Shām (Calcutta: Baptiste Mission, 1854), 178. 
37.  Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, al-ʿAql wa-faḍluhu, 39–40, no. 15.



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wa-bika uʿṭī wa-bika uʿazzu wa-bika uʿrafu wa-iyyāka uʿātibu wa-bika al-thawābu 
wa-ʿalayka al-ʿiqābu.”38 

7. Ibn Shāhīn (d. 385):39 Yaḥyā b. Muḥammad b. Ṣāʿid—al-Ḥasan b. ʿArafa (d. 257/870, 
Baghdad)—Sayf b. Muḥammad b. Ukht Sufyān (Kufa, Baghdad, kadhdhāb)—Sufyān 
al-Thawrī (d. 161/778, Khurasan, Kufa, Basra)—al-Faḍl b. ʿĪsā al-Raqāshī—(matrūk, 
munkar al-ḥadīth, qadarī, qāṣṣ)Abū ʿUthmān al-Nahdī—Abū Hurayra—the Prophet 

Lammā khalaqa Allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “Qum!” fa-qām. Thummā qāla lahu: “Adbir!” 
fa-adbara. Thumma qāla lahu: “Aqbil!” fa-aqbala. Fa-qāla lahu: “Mā khalaqtu khalqan 
huwa khayrun minka wa-lā aḥsanu minka wa-lā akramu minka wa-lā aḥabbu ilayya 
minka. Bika ākhudhu wa-bika uʿṭī wa-bika uʿrafu wa-laka al-thawābu wa-ʿalayka 
al-ʿiqābu.” 

8. Al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī (d. between 318/936 and 320/938):40 ʿAbd al-Raḥīm b. Ḥabīb—
Dāwūd b. Muḥabbir al-Baṣrī41 (d. 206/821, Basra)—al-Ḥasan b. Dīnār (d. mid-second/
eighth century)—al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī—several companions of the Prophet—the Prophet

[Addition in the beginning: “The Intellect is light. God the Almighty created it 
and divided it among His worshippers according to His will concerning them and 
knowledge of them. For it was narrated that the Prophet said:”] Lammā khalaqa 
Allāhu taʿālā al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “Aqbil!” fa-aqbala. Thumma qāla lahu: “Adbir!” 
fa-adbara. Thumma qāla lahu: “Uqʿud!” fa-qaʿada. Thumma qāla lahu: “Unṭuq!” 
fa-naṭaqa. Thumma qāla lahu: “Uṣmut!” fa-ṣamata. Fa-qāla: “Wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī 
wa-kibriyāʾī wa-sulṭānī wa-jabarūtī mā khalaqtu khalqan aḥabba ilayya minka wa-lā 
akrama ʿalayya minka. Bika uʿrafu wa-bika uḥmadu wa-bika uṭāʿu wa-bika ākhudhu 
wa-bika uʿṭī wa-iyyāka uʿātibu wa-laka al-thawābu wa-ʿalayka al-ʿiqābu.” 

9. Al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī:42 Hishām b. Khālid (d. 249/863, Syria)—Baqiyya b. al-Walīd  
(d. 197/812, Syria)—al-Awzāʿī (d. 158/774, Syria)—the Prophet

Lammā khalaqa Allāhu taʿālā al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “Aqbil!” fa-aqbala. Thumma qāla 
lahu: “Adbir!” fa-adbara. Thumma qāla lahu: “Uqʿud!” fa-qaʿada. Thumma qāla lahu: 
“Unṭuq!” fa-naṭaqa. Thumma qāla lahu: “Uṣmut!” fa-ṣamata. Fa-qāla: “Wa-ʿizzatī 
wa-jalālī wa-kibriyāʾī wa-sulṭānī wa-jabarūtī mā khalaqtu khalqan aḥabba ilayya 
minka wa-lā akrama ʿalayya minka. Bika uʿrafu wa-bika uḥmadu wa-bika uṭāʿu 
wa-bika ākhudhu wa-bika uʿṭī wa-iyyāka uʿātibu wa-laka al-thawābu wa-ʿalayka 
al-ʿiqābu. Wa-mā akramtuka bi-shayʾin afḍala min al-ṣabri.”

38.  The same matn and isnād appear in Ibn ʿAdī al-Jurjānī.
39.  Ibn Shāhīn, al-Targhīb fī faḍāʾil al-aʿmāl, ed. M. Ḥ. M. Ḥ. Ismāʿīl (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2004), 

84, no. 252. 
40.  Al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, al-Nuskha al-musnada min Nawādir al-uṣūl fī maʿrifat maṣādir al-Rasūl, ed. I. I. M. 

ʿAwaḍ (Cairo: Maktabat al-Imām al-Bukhārī, 2008), 2:764, no. 1035.
41.  The edition gives his name incorrectly as Dāwūd b. Muḥammad b Muḥarrim al-Baṣrī. 
42.  Al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, al-Nuskha al-musnada, 2:764, no. 1036.



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Chart 1: Sunnī Isnāds

As mentioned earlier, medieval Sunnī critics considered the ḥadīth highly unreliable, 
largely because many of its transmitters are classified as unknown or untrustworthy. The 
criteria developed by some modern scholars also render it dubious, because its isnāds 
consist mainly of different single strands.43 On the other hand, however, these two features 
may in fact provide a reason for greater confidence in the isnāds. The large number of 
transmitters deemed unreliable by the Sunnī tradition suggests that these transmitters had 
some historical connection with the ḥadīth, because if later transmitters had wanted to 
forge full isnāds, they would have probably chosen to name more reliable narrators to give 
their forgery greater authority.

The first thing that stands out when we look at the early Sunnī variants of the ḥadīth 
is that most of their isnāds are Basran; especially in the early second/eighth century, 
many people are reported to have narrated this ḥadīth in Basra. Variants 1, 6, 7, and 9 
feature exclusively Basran transmitters in the second/eighth century. Variants 2 and 3 
include an unknown transmitter, ʿUmar b. Abī Ṣāliḥ al-ʿAtakī, who connects two Basran 
transmitters, so these isnāds can also be safely considered Basran. The isnād of variant 4 is 
Medinan in its second/eighth-century portion, but it, too, shows connections with Basra.44  

43.  See note 22.
44.  The earliest transmitter named in the isnād, Kurayb, was a mawlā of Ibn ʿ Abbās and served as the governor 

of Basra. Ibn ʿAbbās himself had a strong presence in Mecca and Basra. The second transmitter, Muḥammad b. 
ʿUqba, although Medinan, was a mawlā of al-Zubayr b. al-ʿAwwām. Basra had strong Zubayrid inclinations and 
connections.



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Variant 5 is more complicated. It was recorded not in a ḥadīth compilation like the others 
but in a historical work, Futūḥ Shām (“Conquests of Syria”), attributed to Abū ʿIsmāʿīl 
al-Azdī al-Baṣrī, which some modern scholars believe was compiled in the late second/
eighth century.45 The isnād is composed exclusively of members of the tribe of Azd. I suspect 
that Abū Ismāʿīl attached the ḥadīth to the broader narrative, which touches on the theme 
of ʿaql, as a rhetorical embellishment.46 This variant nonetheless constitutes an important 
piece of evidence to support the idea that by Abū ʿIsmāʿīl’s time the ḥadīth was well known 
in Basra to the extent that it sprang to mind when the theme of ʿaql was broached. Variant 
10 is Syrian, but if I am correct that the ḥadīth spread in early second/eighth-century 
Basra, the variant’s earliest transmitter—the famous al-Awzāʿī—lived too late to interfere 
with the ḥadīth’s Basran provenance (if we wanted to give this variant some historical 
credit). Finally, variant 8 is Basran as well as Kufan; however, the isnād’s Kufan part is most 
probably forged. As al-Dāraquṭnī (d. 385/995) noted, the unique isnād implies that only one 
person heard the ḥadīth from Sufyān al-Thawrī, which would be odd in the case of such 
a famous muḥaddith.47 If this part of the isnād is indeed forged, it is significant that it is 
attached to the name of a Basran figure, al-Faḍl b. ʿĪsā al-Raqāshī, who was not particularly 
highly regarded in ḥadīth circles―for if the isnād had been forged in its entirety, it would 
have been more logical to populate it with well-regarded transmitters. Al-Faḍl’s very 
unreliability thus lends greater credibility to the ḥadīth’s historical connection with him. 
Even if we disregard al-Dāraquṭnī’s argument and consider the isnād possibly sound, al-Faḍl 
b. ʿĪsā remains important, because he is then the closest to a common link we get. Either 
way, he is a noteworthy narrator whose interest in ʿaql and connections with the Muʿtazila 
suggest that he probably played some role in the historical transmission of the ḥadīth. 
He was a Basran Muʿtazilī preacher (qāṣṣ, wāʿiẓ) and a follower of Ghaylān al-Dimashqī  
(fl. ca. 100/719), who, according to Josef van Ess, emphasized the role of ʿaql.48 

45.  See S. A. Mourad, “On Early Islamic Historiography: Abū Ismāʿīl al-Azdī and His Futūḥ al-Shām,” Journal 
of the American Oriental Society 120, no. 4 (2000): 577–93. 

46.  There are three reasons for my suspicion. First, the ḥadīth plays no role in the narrative; it is merely 
a digression on the theme of ʿaql mentioned in a story about an encounter between Khālid b. al-Walīd and a 
Byzantine general by the name of Bāhān. Second, if conciseness is any indicator of historicity, as some scholars 
have argued, this version, with all its additions, seems to be later. Cf. Motzki, “Dating Muslim Traditions,” 
212–13. Finally, the name of the third transmitter, Abū Jahḍam al-Azdī, provides an important clue: he also 
narrated other stories about Bāhān. See al-Azdī, Futūḥ Shām, 185, 192, 193. It seems likely, therefore, that Abū 
Ismāʿīl heard the narrative together with others and added the ḥadīth to it. It is also noteworthy that although 
Abū Jahḍam is usually described in rijāl works as a Syrian who narrated from Kufans such as Shurayḥ, Ibn 
Ḥibbān says that he is counted among the people of Basra (ʿidāduhu fī ahl al-Baṣra). Ibn Ḥibbān, Kitāb al-Thiqāt 
(Hyderabad: Majlis Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif al-ʿUthmāniyya, 1973), 7:144. 

47.  Al-Dāraquṭnī also notes that just as Sayf b. Muḥammad is the only person who narrated it from Sufyān, 
al-Ḥasan b. ʿArafa is the only person who narrated it from Sayf. Al-Dāraquṭnī and Abū al-Faḍl al-Maqdisī, Aṭrāf 
al-gharāʾib wa-l-afrād min ḥadīth Rasūl Allāh li-l-imām al-Dāraquṭnī, ed. M. M. M. Ḥ. Naṣṣār and S. Yūsif (Beirut: 
Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1998), 5:240. 

48.  J. van Ess, Zwischen Ḥadīt̲ und Theologie: Studien zum Entstehen prädestinatianischer Überlieferung 
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975), 121–22. Ibn Ḥajar says about al-Faḍl “qāla Yaʿqūb b. Sufyān “muʿtazilī, ḍaʿīf al-ḥadīth.” 
Ibn Ḥajar, Tahdhīb al-Tahdhīb, vol. 8, (Beirut: Dār al-Fikr, 1984), no. 521.



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Finally, another Basran transmitter who looms over others in rijāl works as the culprit 
for “forging” the ḥadīth confirms the Muʿtazilī origin theory. Al-Dāraquṭnī and others agree 
almost unanimously that a certain Dāwūd b. Muḥabbir and a couple of men associated with 
him49 forged the ḥadīth. This Dāwūd, according to the critics, spent too much time with the 
Muʿtazila, and they ruined his reputation.50 Dāwūd b. Muḥabbir is the author of a work titled 
Kitāb al-ʿAql. This work, which was still available to ḥadīth scholars such as al-Ḥāfiẓ al-ʿIrāqī 
(d. 806/1404),51 collected ḥadīths that dealt with the theme of ʿaql, and it also included the 
ḥadīth under study. Dāwūd was probably responsible for the ḥadīth’s wide dissemination in 
Sunnī circles. His poor reputation probably accounts for the fact that he does not appear as 
the common link. It is possible that some later narrators indeed forged some of the isnāds, 
precisely because they wanted to cite the ḥadīth without mentioning the disgraced Dāwūd.

The Sunnī isnāds thus strongly suggest that the ḥadīth circulated in early second/eighth-
century Basra, which was the hub of the forming Muʿtazila. The rijāl works also point 
overwhelmingly to a Muʿtazilī connection, though they do so inadvertently (since they 
claim that Dāwūd forged the ḥadīth, not simply disseminated it).

Let us now consider the ḥadīth’s circulation among early Shīʿī traditionists. In contrast 
to its dubious reputation among medieval Sunnī critics, the ḥadīth enjoys a canonical status 
in Shīʿī circles. The variants here are taken from three prestigious early ḥadīth collections: 
al-Barqī’s Maḥāsin, al-Kulaynī’s Kāfī, and al-Ṣaddūq’s Āmālī and Man lā yaḥḍuruhu al-faqīh. 
A glance at the isnāds tells us that the ḥadīth circulated in Kufa, which is not surprising as 
Kufa was the center of Shīʿism in this time. The isnāds and matns are listed chronologically 
according to the compilers’ death dates. All variants closely resemble one another, with the 
exception of variants 15 and 17, which represent much-expanded versions that nonetheless 
still contain the basic ḥadīth.52

Shīʿī variants (isnāds and matns) 

10. Al-Barqī (d. 274/887):53 Muḥammad b. ʿAlī—Wuhayb b. Ḥafṣ (Kufa, wrote books)—
Abū Baṣīr (d. 150/767, Kufa)—Imam al-Ṣādiq

49.  Four names are usually mentioned: Maysara b. ʿAbd Rabbihi, Dāwūd b. al-Muḥabbir, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Abī 
Rajāʾ, and Sulaymān b. ʿĪsā al-Sanjarī. See al-Zabīdī’s commentary below for more detail. Dāwūd b. al-Muḥabbir 
is the only one of these four mentioned in the isnāds. It thus seems that he was the one responsible for the 
ḥadīth’s spread and circulation among Sunnī muḥaddiths. Many sources quote al-Dāraquṭnī as the author of 
the accusation that Dāwūd forged the ḥadīth. In the printed material available to me, I found al-Dāraquṭnī’s 
denunciation of Dāwūd b. al-Muḥabbir, but not one made in the context of this ḥadīth. See, e.g., Abū al-Ḥasan 
al-Dāraquṭnī, Sunan, ed. A. A. ʿAbd al-Mawjūd and A. M. Muʿawwaḍ (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, 2001), 1:386–87; 
al-Dāraquṭnī, al-Ḍuʿafāʾ wa-l-matrūkūn, ed. M. b. ʿA. b. ʿAbd al-Qādir (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Maʿārif, 1984), 202. 

50.  See Appendix.
51.  Al-Ḥāfīẓ al-ʿIrāqī was one of the leading Shāfiʿī scholars of his time. He wrote a commentary on al-Ghazālī’s 

Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn. 
52.  See below for a discussion of the “Armies” ḥadīth. 
53.  Al-Barqī, al-Maḥāsin, 1: 306, no. 602.



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Inna Allāha khalaqa al-ʿaqla fa-qāla lahu: “Aqbil!” fa-aqbala. Thumma qāla lahu: 
“Adbir!” fa-adbara. Thumma qāla lahu: “Wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī mā khalaqtu shayʾan 
aḥabba ilayya minka. Laka al-thawābu wa-ʿalayka al-ʿiqābu.” 

11. Al-Barqī:54 al-Sindī b. Muḥammad—al-ʿAlāʾ b. Razīn (Kufa)—Muḥammad b. Muslim 
(companion of Imams al-Bāqir, and al-Ṣādiq, Kufa)— Imam al-Bāqir and Imam 
al-Ṣādiq

Lammā khalaqa Allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “Adbir!” fa-adbara. Thumma qāla lahu: 
“Aqbil!” fa-aqbala. Fa-qāla: “Wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī mā khalaqtu khalqan aḥsana minka. 
Iyyāka āmuru wa-iyyāka anhī wa-iyyāka uthību wa-iyyāka uʿāqibu.” 

12. Al-Barqī and al-Kulaynī:55 Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā—al-Ḥasan b. Maḥbūb  
(= al-Sarrād, narrated from Imam al-Riḍā, “one of the four pillars of his era”)—
al-ʿAlāʾ b. Razīn—Muḥammad b. Muslim—Imam al-Bāqir

Lammā khalaqa Allāhu al-ʿaqla istanṭaqahu. Thumma qāla lahu: “Aqbil!” fa-aqbala. 
Thumma qāla lahu: “Adbir!” fa-adbara. Thumma qāla lahu: “Wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī mā 
khalaqtu khalqan huwa aḥabbu ilayya minka. Wa-lā ukammiluka illā fīman uḥibbu. 
Amā innī iyyāka āmuru wa-iyyāka anhī wa-iyyāka uʿāqibu wa-iyyāka uthību.” 

13. Al-Barqī:56 ʿAlī b. al-Ḥakam (companion of Imam al-Jawwād, Baghdad)—Hishām b. 
al-Ḥakam (companion of Imams al-Ṣādiq and Musā al-Kāẓim, great mutakallim, 
Wasit, Baghdad)57— Imam al-Ṣādiq 

Lammā khalaqa Allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “Aqbil!” fa-aqbala. Thumma qāla lahu: 
“Adbir!” fa-adbara. Thumma qāla lahu: “Wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī mā khalaqtu khalqan 
huwa aḥabbu ilayya minka. Bika ākhudhu wa-bika uʿṭī wa-ʿalayka uthību.” 

14. Al-Barqī:58 Muḥammad b. Khālid—ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Faḍl al-Nawfalī—the latter’s 
father—Imam al-Ṣādiq—the Prophet 

Khalaqa Allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “Adbir!” fa-adbara. Thumma qāla lahu: “Aqbil!” 
fa-aqbala. Thumma qāla: “Mā khalaqtu khalqan aḥabba ilayya minka.”

Qāla: Fa-aʿṭā Allāhu Muḥammadan ṣallā Allāhu ʿalayhi wa-ālihi wa-sallam tisʿata 
wa-tisʿīna juzʾan thumma qassama bayna al-ʿibādi juzʾan wāḥidan. 

54.  Ibid., no. 603.
55.  Ibid., no. 604; al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī, 1:5, no. 1.
56.  Al-Barqī, al-Maḥāsin, 1:307, no. 605.
57.  The other possibility is Hishām b. Sālim. ʿAlī b. al-Ḥakam narrated ḥadīth from both Hishāms.
58.  Ibid., no. 606.



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15. The “Armies ḥadīth”; al-Barqī, al-Kulaynī, and al-Ṣaddūq:59 ʿAlī b. Ḥadīd—Samāʿa  
b. Mihrān (companion of Imam al-Ṣādiq, Kufa)— Imam al-Ṣādiq 

God created the Intellect, which is the first creation among spiritual beings residing 
to the right of the Throne from His light, and . . .

. . . qāla lahu: “Adbir!” fa-adbara. Thumma qāla lahu: “Aqbil” fa-aqbala. Fa-qāla 
Allāhu taʿālā lahu: “Khalaqtuka khalqan ʿaẓīman wa-karramtuka ʿalā jamīʿ khalqī.” 

Then he created Ignorance . . . [a long narrative follows about Ignorance’s 
disobedience and about the creation of seventy-five armies for both the Intellect 
and Ignorance] 

16. Al-Kulaynī:60 Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan—Sahl b. Ziyād (Qum, Rayy, ghalw, weak ḥadīth 
narrator) Ibn Abī Najrān (Kufa, narrated from Imam Riḍā, d. 203/817)—al-ʿAlāʾ  
b. Razīn—Muḥammad b. Muslim—Imam al-Bāqir

Lammā khalaqa Allāhu al-ʿaqla qāla lahu: “Aqbil!” fa-aqbala. Thumma qāla lahu: 
“Adbir!” fa-adbara. Fa-qāla: “Wa-ʿizzatī mā khalaqtu khalqan ahsana minka. Iyyāka 
āmuru wa-iyyāka anhī wa-iyyāka uthību wa-iyyāka uʿāqibu.” 

17. Al-Ṣaddūq:61 Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Shāh—Abū Ḥāmid Aḥmad b. Muḥammad  
b. Aḥmad b. al-Ḥusayn—Abū Yazīd Aḥmad b. Khālid al-Khālidī—Muhammad  
b. Aḥmad b. Ṣāliḥ al-Tamīmī—the latter’s father—Muḥammad b. Ḥātim al-Qaṭṭān62—
Ḥammād b. ʿAmr—Imam Ṣādiq—Imam Bāqir—Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn (d. 95/712)—ʿAlī  
b. Abī Ṭālib (d.40/661)

[part of a narrative several pages long about the Prophet’s waṣiyya to ʿAlī] Yā ʿAlī: 
inna awalla khalaqa khalqahu Allāhu ʿazza wa-jalla al-ʿaqlu fa-qāla lahu: “Aqbil!” 
fa-aqbala. Thumma qāla lahu: “Adbir!” fa-adbara. Fa-qāla: “Wa-ʿizzatī wa-jalālī mā 
khalaqtu khalqan huwa aḥabbu ilayya minka. Bika ākhudhu wa-bika uʿṭī wa-bika 
uthību wa-bika uʿāqibu.”

59.  Ibid., 1:311, no. 620; al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī, 1:11, no. 14; al-Ṣāddūq, Amālī al-Ṣaddūq (Beirut: Muʾassasat 
al-Aʿlamī li-l-Maṭbūʿāt, 2009), 304. 

60.  Al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī, 1:13, no. 26.
61.  Al-Ṣaddūq, Man lā yaḥḍuruhu al-faqīh, ed. ʿA. A. al-Ghaffārī (Qum: Muʾassasat al-Nashr al-Islāmī, 1429H), 

4:369, no. 5765, isnāds to Ḥammād and Anas on p. 536 (unreliable isnād).
62.  Al-Ṣaddūq provides also an alternative isnād, which replaces Muḥammad b. Ḥātim al-Qattān and Ḥammād 

b. ʿAmr with Anas b. Muḥammad Abū Mālik and his father.



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Chart 2 : Shīʿī Isnāds. 

The Shīʿī variants document the spread of the ḥadīth in the middle of the second/
eighth century in Kufa, around the same time that Dāwūd was disseminating it in Sunnī 
circles. Since we did not see many Kufan figures in the earlier Sunnī isnāds, the ḥadīth 
must have originated outside Kufa and traveled there from Basra. Al-ʿAlāʾ b. Razīn, who 
lived in the second half of the second/eighth century, seems to be the common link and 
the main candidate for the disseminator of the ḥadīth in Basra. In the Shīʿī tradition, he is 
considered a reliable transmitter who had books from which “everyone narrated ḥadīth.”63 
Another interesting transmitter, given what we know of his life, is Hishām b. al-Ḥakam  
(d. 179/795), the famous Shīʿī theologian who debated the Muʿtazila—if it is indeed this 
Hishām who is meant here.64 In any case, it is evident that the ḥadīth spread first in Basra 
and then in Kufa by the second half of the second/eighth century. 

63.  Lahu kutub yarwīhā jamāʿatun; al-Khūʾī, Muʿjam rijāl al-ḥadīth (Najaf: Maktabat al-Imām al-Khūʾī, n.d.), 
12:184. 

64.  ʿ Alī b. al-Ḥakam narrated from two Hishāms, Hishām b. al-Ḥakam and Hishām b. Sālim. See al-Khūʾī, Rijāl, 
12:411–25, esp. 414. 



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The real common link between the Sunnī and Shīʿī traditions is not a single person but 
the Muʿtazilī environment of Basra. In Basra, the ḥadīth emerged as a saying encapsulating 
a Muʿtazilī teaching about human responsibility conditioned by the Intellect’s ability 
to tell good from evil. The early Muʿtazila were not a private group, quite the opposite; 
they sent out missionaries (duʿāt) to spread their doctrine and instructed them in public 
disputations.65 The two founding fathers of the Muʿtazila, Wāsit b. ʿAṭāʾ and ʿAmr b. ʿUbayd, 
were both famed preachers. Early second/eighth-century Basra was thus infused with 
Muʿtazilī ideas. 

It is important to emphasize that we are not dealing here with a quotation from a 
treatise by a great systematic Muʿtazilī theologian such as al-ʿAllāf or even Wāṣil himself;66 
rather, the ḥadīth is an echo of Muʿtazilī teachings among the broader Basran public. In this 
way, the ḥadīth’s emergence highlights an important function of the genre as a means of 
communicating the intellectual debates of the day to the public. Therefore, we do not need 
to talk about direct influences or borrowings between different sects. Basra was a booming 
intellectual center in the early second/eighth century, where different people participated 
in lively debates and from which ideas spread to the wider world. 

The transformation of a Muʿtazilī teaching into the form of a ḥadīth is what subsequently 
enabled it to spread among people and groups of different inclinations. The examination of 
the ḥadīth’s variants shows that all kinds of later collectors recorded it, even those who can 
in no way be suspected of having sympathies for the Muʿtazila. This is the case, for example, 
with Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, a famous Sunnī scholar and a representative of the ascetic strand 
of ahl al-ḥadīth who not only recorded this ḥadīth but also compiled a book on ʿaql.67 It is 
thanks to its ḥadīth form that this former Muʿtazilī teaching could be dissociated from its 
original setting and reinterpreted by various narrators, for ḥadīths were accepted by all and 
accessible to all, regardless of sect or socioeconomic status. Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, as his book 
suggests, did not understand the ḥadīth it in rationalistic terms but as a tradition about 
divine wisdom. The ḥadīth form turned any idea into a currency up for grabs for any group, 
which could then infuse its ideas into it. 

The Muʿtazilī origin of the ḥadīth and its subsequent spread in the Sunnī and Shīʿī 
circles furthermore illustrates the porousness of the boundaries between these groups 
in the second/eighth century. Michael Dann has documented the important role that 
Shīʿī transmitters played in the transmission of ḥadīths in the proto-Sunnī milieu before 
150/767. 68 It is worth emphasizing that none of these groups was yet a well-defined entity 
in this time. Early Muʿtazila was still “a tradition of socially and politically disembodied    

65.  S. Stroumsa, “The Beginnings of the Muʿtazila Reconsidered,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 13 
(1990): 265–93, at 287–91. 

66.  If Wāṣil indeed wrote books. Van Ess suggested that the books attributed to him whose names have been 
preserved may have been written later by Ḍirār b. ʿAmr. Stroumsa, “Beginnings of the Muʿtazila,” 291. 

67.  Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, al-ʿAql wa-faḍluh, 40. 
68.  M. Dann, “Contested Boundaries: The Reception of Shīʿite Narrators in the Sunnī Hadith Tradition” (PhD 

diss., Princeton University, 2015).



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intellection,” in Michael Cook’s words,69 and as for early Shīʿism, both medieval and modern 
scholars have struggled to categorize its various groups (for example, tashayyuʿ and rafḍ).70 
Regarding the Sunnīs, some scholars have objected to the use of the term prior to the fifth/
eleventh century.71  In the second/eighth century, as Racha el-Omari observed, “seemingly 
everyone was engaged in reporting ḥadīth [...] including proto-Muʿtazilites” 72 and thus it is 
not surprising that these group would share some of the ḥadīth material. 

The relationship between early Shīʿism and the Muʿtazila, in particular, has been hotly 
debated, because the two groups later on came to overlap on many points. Scholars have 
argued either that the Shīʿīs acquired Muʿtazilī positions early on or that they developed 
them independently.73 By contrast, others, such as Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, have 
painted early Shīʿism as an esoteric (not a rationalist) movement.74 What is interesting is 
that in their efforts to present early Shīʿīsm as rationalistic or esoteric, respectively, both 
camps have used this ḥadīth and other ʿaql traditions to support their positions.75 In a way, 
then, they continue the practice of reinterpreting and engaging with the ḥadīth in their 
modern scholarly practice.

 By the end of the second/eighth century, however, the sectarian boundaries became 
much more defined. The ahl al-ḥadīth appropriated ḥadīth as their dominion, through 
the rising institution of isnād and excluded non-ahl al-ḥadīth transmitters from it,76 while 
other groups, especially the Muʿtazila, criticized them for abusing ḥadīth as an ideological 
weapon.77 However, as the next section shows, using the example of ʿaql ḥadīth, different 
groups continued to use, adapt, and interpret ḥadīths for centuries. Especially non-legal 
ḥadīth (like the one under study) were under much less scrutiny. The genre’s adaptability 
to new environments and intellectual frameworks is one of its important literary facets 
and ḥadīths should be thus seen as an important vehicle for expressing ideas and creating 
memorable shortcuts. 

69.  M. Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2004), 195. Sarah Stroumsa has also pointed out that there was no one political platform that united the 
Muʿtazila. Stroumsa, “Beginnings of the Muʿtazila.”

70.  Dann, “Contested Boundaries,” 30–34. 
71.  Ibid., 8. 
72.  R. El-Omari, “Accommodation and Resistance: Classical Muʿtazilites on Ḥadīth,” Journal of Near Eastern 

Studies 71, no. 2 (2012): 231-256, at 232. 
73.  H. A. Abdulsater, Shiʿi Doctrine, Muʿtazili Theology: Al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā and Imami Discourse  

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 2–3.
74.  M. A. Amir-Moezzi, The Divine Guide in Early Shiʿism: The Sources of Esotericism in Islam (Albany: State 

University of New York Press, 1994).
75.  Amir-Moezzi understands the Shīʿī ʿaql as a phenomenon he labels “hiero-intelligence,” which has four 

dimensions—cosmogonic, ethical-epistemological, spiritual, and soteriological. In his view, the transformation 
of ʿ aql into the logical ʿ aql of the theologians began in the third/ninth century under the influence of Aristotelian 
texts. Amir-Moezzi, Divine Guide, 11. For his discussion of ʿ aql, see 6–13. Cf. W. Madelung, “Early Imāmī Theology 
as Reflected in the Kitāb al-Kāfī of al-Kulaynī,” in The Study of Shiʿi Islam: History, Theology and Law, ed. F. 
Daftary, 465–74 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 467–68. 

76.  On the decline of Shīʿī narrators in the proto-Sunnī milieu see Dann, “Contested Boundaries,” 1-28.  
77.  El-Omari, “Accommodation and Resistance,” 234-236.



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2. The Journey of the ʿAql Ḥadīth in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period

By the fourth/tenth century, the ʿaql ḥadīth had spread across the whole Islamic world 
in the works of authors with divergent interests, from the pious Sunnī ascetic Ibn Abī 
al-Dunyā in Baghdad to the adīb Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi (d. 328/940) in Cordoba and the Ṣūfī 
master al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī in Termez in modern-day Uzbekistan.78 Throughout its long 
journey, the ḥadīth was reinterpreted and adapted to new contexts in a number of different 
ways. I have chosen five examples. The first three come from the medieval period and 
illustrate the diverse ways in which the text of the ḥadīth could be molded. 

Three Medieval Variants

The first example presents the ḥadīth unchanged but set into a new intellectual 
framework and reinterpreted. This instance is associated with Aḥmad b. Khābiṭ (d. between 
227/842 and 232/847), who had studied with the Muʿtazilī theologian al-Naẓẓām.79 Ibn 
Khābiṭ was from a well-known Basran Muʿtazilī family, but the Muʿtazilīs denounced his 
teachings about the migration of souls as going too far, and as a result he was investigated 
under the caliph al-Wāthiq. He and his companion Faḍl al-Ḥadathī are reported to have 
taught the ḥadīth with a twist. According to the heresiologist ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Baghdādī  
(d. 429/1037), they held that there were two lords of the universe, one eternal and one 
created, the latter being Jesus, who is identical with the ʿaql of the ḥadīth. Al-Baghdādī 
quotes Ibn Khābiṭ and al-Faḍl saying: “The Messiah armored himself with a body; before 
that he was ʿaql.”80 

The second example shows the ḥadīth combined with another, forming a new narrative. 
In this form it appears in Kitāb al-Aẓilla (“Book of Shadows”), a text written in the circles 
of Shīʿī Ghulāt (“Extremists”) in the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries in Iraq and 
preserved as quotations in various Nuṣayrī texts.81 (The Nuṣayrīs were a group of Ghulāt 
who left Iraq and settled in Syria.) The ḥadīth speaks about God first creating a name of four 
letters (MḤMD), then other names from it, then His throne on water, and only then the ʿaql. 
It continues: 

Then God spread His light, and from that light He created an image. Then from 
knowledge (ʿilm), power (qudra), light (nūr), and will (mashīʾa) He created by His 
command intelligence (ʿaql). He then commanded: “Turn toward me!” And intelligence 
turned toward Him. Then He commanded: “Turn away!” And it turned away. God then

78.  Ibn ʿAbd Rabbihi, al-ʿIqd al-farīd, ed. M. M. Qumayḥa (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1997), 2:107. 
Without isnād. For the other references, see chart 1.

79.  On Aḥmad b. Khābiṭ, see J. van Ess, Theology and Society in the Second and Third Centuries of the Hijra, 
trans. G. Goldbloom (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 3:467–72. 

80.  Al-Baghdādī, al-Farq bayna al-firaq, ed. M. M. ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Madanī, 1964), 277. 
81.  M. Asatryan, “Shiite Underground Literature between Iraq and Syria: ‘The Book of Shadows’ and the 

History of Early Ghulat,” in Texts in Transit in the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. Y. T. Langermann and R. G. 
Morrison, 128–61 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 131.



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told it, “By you I reward and by you I punish,” and made it live with water, possessed 
of knowledge, eternally in the realm.82

The part that comes from a different ḥadīth is the motif of knowledge, power, light, and will; 
this element has been recorded in the Ikhtiṣāṣ, attributed to Shaykh Mufīd (d. 413/1022).83 
Mushegh Asatryan places the teaching of the Kitāb al-Aẓilla in the Iraqi Ghulāt milieu of 
the second/eighth and third/ninth centuries, whose center was in Kufa. This is probably 
where the two ḥadīths crossed trajectories.84 In the context of Shīʿī Ghulāt, Asatryan and 
Dylan Burns connect the idea of the ʿaql moving back and forth over a primordial water to 
Jewish sapiential traditions about the presence of the divine Wisdom at the moment of first 
creation.85 

The third example, which I call the “Armies ḥadīth,” is the ʿaql ḥadīth’s much-extended 
variant. This tradition, also included in al-Kulaynī’s Kāfī as no. 14, has not lost its appeal, 
as a modern commentary on it by Ruhollah Khomeini indicates.86 It includes the motif 
of the Intellect’s creation and obedience and expands on it by describing the creation of 
Ignorance, its failing the obedience test, and the divine allotment of seventy-five armies to 
the two opposing sides: 

God, may He be glorified and exalted, created ʿaql first among the spiritual entities; 
He drew it forth from the right of His throne (ʿarsh), making it proceed from His own 
Light. Then He commanded it to retreat, and it retreated, to advance, and it advanced; 
then God proclaimed: “I created you glorious, and I gave you pre-eminence over all 
my creatures.” Then Ignorance (al-jahl) was created; seeing its pride and its hesitation 
in approaching God, He damned it: “Then, from the briny ocean God created dark 
Ignorance; He ordered it to retreat and it retreated, to advance and it did not advance. 
Then God said to it “Certainly you have grown proud,” and He damned it and chased it 
from His presence. [. . .] Then God endowed ʿaql with 75 armies; when Ignorance saw 
God’s generosity toward ʿaql, it became ferociously hostile and said to God: “O Lord, 
here is a creature similar to me; you have privileged it and made it powerful. I am its 
adversary and I have no power. Give me troops like those of ʿaql.” And God replied, 
“So be it, but if you revolt again, I shall banish you and your troops from my Mercy.”87

Whereas the more basic version of the ḥadīth is about taklīf, this extended variation 
partakes in a wider Shīʿī dualistic discourse about the cosmic struggle between the powers 

82.  M. Asatryan and D. Burns, “Is Ghulat Religion Islamic Gnosticism? Religious Transmissions in Late 
Antiquity,” in L’ésotérisme shi’ite, ses racines et ses prolongements, ed. M. A. Amir-Moezzi, M. De Cillis, D. De 
Smet, and O. Mir-Kasimov, 55–86 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 60. The translation is theirs, hence the differences 
in wording. 

83.  Asatryan, “Shiite Underground Literature,” 141–42. 
84.  Ibid., 142.
85.  Asatryan and Burns, “Is Ghulat Religion Islamic Gnosticism?,” 82.
86.  R. Khomeini, Junūd al-ʿaql wa-l-jahl, trans. into Arabic A. al-Fahrī (Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Aʿlamī li-l-

Maṭbūʿāt, 2001).
87.  Translation from Amir-Moezzi, Divine Guide, 8. 



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of good and evil, which likely built on and mixed with more ancient traditions in the 
region.88 Amir-Moezzi has drawn parallels, for instance, between the “Armies ḥadīth” and 
the Mazdean teaching that the entities of Wisdom and Ignorance are engaged in perpetual 
combat.89 

Variously expressing ideas about the identification of ʿaql with Jesus as the lesser 
creator, reflecting Jewish beliefs about the divine Wisdom, or echoing Mazdean dualistic 
teachings, the ḥadīth traveled from one community to another, with each adapting the text 
to reflect its world view. These changes should be seen not in terms of forgery, falsification, 
or plagiarism but rather as a more organic process. The exchange of formulas, the filling 
in of words, and the addition of short passages are all to be expected in a society whose 
members had immediate access to large databases of texts and traditions stored in their 
memory. Ḥadīths were the substance that traveled across sectarian boundaries and social 
classes and and that people molded consciously or unconsciously to communicate different 
ideas effectively. 

Two Early Modern Commentaries

The ḥadīth’s legacy extended well beyond the medieval period, as the ḥadīth continued 
to be narrated and reinterpreted. By the early modern period, the Sunnī and Shiʿī ḥadīth 
traditions were well established, and so we turn to ḥadīth commentaries to see how the 
ḥadīth was understood at this time. Ḥadīth commentaries are not “merely a derivative 
and rarified literary practice,”90 as they were once perceived; rather, they constitute 
an arena in which commentators engaged with tradition creatively and in novel ways.  
The two commentaries analyzed here, by Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī and Mullā Ṣadrā, show how 
the authors use the ḥadīth as inspiration for intellectual contemplation. They approach it 
as a hermeneutical challenge. The two scholars, one known mainly as a ḥadīth scholar and 
the other as a philosopher, both grapple with the ḥadīth and creatively reinterpret it to fit 
their understanding of the world. Regarding Ṣadrā’s commentary, Jari Kaukua asks: “Does 
Ṣadrā simply read his philosophical doctrine into the religious texts, or do the latter have 
a significant influence on his philosophy?”91 Kaukua concludes that the philosopher’s main 
motivation is “to maintain the integrity of the philosophical theory.”92 This may indeed 
have been his internal motivation, but it does not invalidate his earnest attempt to weave 
in the religious traditions. More than anything, the two scholars’ treatment of the ḥadīth 
shows their efforts to harmonize different strands of Islamic thought and their creativity in 
expounding their ideas through this ḥadīth.

88.  On the early Shīʿī dualistic discourse, see M. A. Amir-Moezzi, The Silent Qur’an and the Speaking Qur’an: 
Scriptural Sources of Islam between History and Fervour, trans. E. Ormsby (New York: Columbia University 
Press, 2015), 92–96.

89.  Amir-Moezzi, Divine Guide, 8, n. 13. 
90.  Blecher, Said the Prophet of God, 13. 
91.  J. Kaukua, “The Intellect in Mullā Ṣadrā’s Commentary on the Uṣūl al-Kāfī,” forthcoming. 
92.  Kaukua, “Intellect in Mullā Ṣadrā’s Commentary.” 



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The first commentary on the ḥadīth is taken from Sharḥ Uṣūl al-Kāfī, Mullā Ṣadrā’s 
seventeenth-century commentary on the first part of al-Kulaynī’s al-Kāfī.93 Mullā Ṣadrā, 
“arguably the most significant Islamic philosopher after Avicenna,”94 was an Iranian Shīʿī 
thinker who became famous for his attempt to synthesize philosophical methods with 
insights from theology and mysticism; he exerted a dominant influence on modern Shīʿī 
thought.95 His interpretation of the ḥadīth shows influences from Avicennan philosophy, the 
ishrāqī (“illuminative”) school associated with al-Suhrawardī, and the Ṣūfī metaphysics of 
being formulated by Ibn ʿArabī. The second text comes from Itḥāf al-sāda al-muttaqīn (“The 
gift of the God-fearing sayyids”), an eighteenth-century commentary by Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī 
on Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (“Revival of the religious sciences”) by the famous Sunnī theologian 
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111).96 Al-Zabīdī, a prominent Sunnī scholar of ḥadīth and a 
Ṣūfī theologian, was a towering figure of his age. A man of universal erudition, he hosted 
visitors who came to meet him from near and far, and he had a vast scholarly network and 
excellent relations with the Ottoman court. He was born in Bilgrām in modern-day India, 
grew up in Zabīd in Yemen, and settled in Cairo. His fame rests mainly on his Tāj al-ʿarūs 
(“Bridal crown”), the largest Arabic lexicon ever written. 

The two scholars’ motivated engagement with the tradition is clear, in the first instance, 
in the close attention that they pay to the ḥadīth’s isnāds. Al-Zabīdī examines with particular 
care the Sunnī isnāds, whose reliability has been seriously contested, and argues against his 
major source of isnād criticism, al-Ḥāfiẓ al-ʿIrāqī,97 that not all of the ḥadīth’s pathways 
(ṭuruq) are weak. He singles out the variant recorded by ʿAbd Allāh b. Aḥmad in his Zawāʾid 
to his father’s Kitāb al-Zuhd (variant 1 above) as a having a sound isnād. In an effort to 
salvage some of the ḥadīth’s credibility, he concludes that “what can be said about it at 
most is that it is weak in some of its pathways (ṭuruq).”98 

Both Mullā Ṣadrā and al-Zabīdī attempt to harmonize contradictory traditions and 
explain away any inconsistencies. I mentioned earlier that there were two versions of the 
ḥadīth.99 The first—which is attested in the earlier versions—started with lammā, “when,” 
whereas the second began with awwalu mā, “the first thing [that God created].” The awwalu 
mā formula was shared by a large number of other sayings that talk about the first creation 
but substitute some other entity, such as light, spirit, a cherub, or the pen, for ʿaql. Some 

93.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Sharḥ Uṣūl al-Kāfī, ed. M. Khawājawī (Tehran: Muʾassasa-i Muṭālaʿāt wa Taḥqīqāt-i Farhangī, 
1366H), 215–19. 

94.  S. Rizvi, “Mulla Sadra,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, spring 2019 ed., ed. E. N. Zalta.
95.  The studies on Mullā Ṣadrā are too numerous to be listed here. For an exhaustive bibliography, see Rizvi, 

“Mulla Sadra.” 
96.  Al-Zabīdī, Itḥāf al-sāda al-muttaqīn bi-sharḥ Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1894), 

452–56.
97.  Al-ʿIrāqī, Takhrīj aḥādīth Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, ed. A. ʿA. M. b. M. al-Ḥaddād (Riyadh: Dār al-ʿĀṣima, 1987). 

The text thus usually consists of three main levels: the Iḥyāʾ of al-Ghazālī, the commentary of al-ʿIrāqī, and the 
commentary of al-Zabīdī. In the analytical part al-ʿIrāqī’s text is substituted by the work of Shaykh Najm al-Dīn. 
See below. 

98.  See Appendix. 
99.  See note 15.



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of these sayings contradict the ʿaql ḥadīth in spirit; for example, the version with the pen 
takes a predestinarian position by portraying God’s first act as the creation the divine Pen, 
which then writes down all human destiny: “The first thing God created was the Pen. Then 
He said to it, ‘Write.’ So [the Pen] wrote what came to pass and what will come to pass until 
the Day of Resurrection.”100 Mullā Ṣadrā makes clear, at the outset of his discussion of the 
ḥadīth, that these seemingly different and conflicting ḥadīths all refer to the same reality: 

The Intellect is the first creation, the closest of the created things (majʿūlāt) to the 
First Truth, the greatest, the most perfect, and the second among the existents in 
existentiality (mawjūdiyya)—although the Almighty has no second in His reality (fī 
ḥaqīqatihi) because His oneness (waḥdatuhu) is not countable as others in the genus of 
countable things (waḥdāt) are. And this is what is meant in what has come to us in the 
ḥadīths from him [the Prophet], may God bless him and his family, and in his sayings 
in the version, “The first thing that God created was the Intellect,” and in the version, 
“The first thing that God created was my light,” and in the version, “The first thing that 
God created was my spirit,” and in the version, “The first thing that God created was the 
pen,” and in the version, “The first thing that God created was a cherub (karūbī).” All 
of these are attributes and descriptions of one thing in different phrasings. It is called 
by a different name in reference to each attribute. The names are multiple, while the 
named (musammā) is one in essence and existence.

Later in the text, Mullā Ṣadrā explains that all of these entities are just different names for 
the Intellect. He argues, for example, that the Intellect “was referred to as the pen only 
because it is the tool [of God] to represent the truths (al-ʿulūm wa-l-ḥaqāʾiq) on the spiritual 
tablets of divine decree and of fate (al-alwāḥ al-nafsāniyya al-qaḍāʾiyya wa-l-qadariyya).”101 

Al-Zabīdī, for his part, relies on an earlier text to harmonize these accounts through a 
linguistic argument. He quotes at length Shaykh Najm al-Dīn (d. 654/1256), an Iranian Ṣūfī 
intellectual who fled from the Mongol invasion to Anatolia, where he played an important 
role in the development of mysticism. In the quoted passage, Shaykh Najm al-Dīn explains 
that God referred to the Intellect as the pen synecdochally, using a part to stand for the 
whole (that is, the Intellect writing with the pen): “When He [God] called it [the Intellect] 
the pen, He told it: ‘Tell what will come to pass from now until the Day of Judgment.’ Calling 
it ‘pen’ is like calling the owner of a sword ‘sword.’”102 He also argues for the functional and 
semantic equivalence of the two terms a little later in the text, when he points out that “the 
pen is close in meaning to the Intellect” on the basis of Q 96:4, which states that God “taught 

100.  This is the version found in ʿAlī b. Ibrāhīm al-Qummī, Tafsīr, ed. Ṭ. M. al-Jāzāʾirī (Najaf: Maktabat 
al-Hudā, 1966–68), 2:198, quoted in Crow, “Role of al-ʿAql,” 126. Van Ess has located the emergence of the “pen” 
ḥadīth among the jabrī circles of first/seventh-century Kufa. It makes sense that a concrete entity such as a pen, 
which has a clear antecedent in Qurʾān Q 68:1, would spark the creation of a ḥadīth earlier than would the more 
abstract ʿaql, which lacks such clear Qurʾānic referents. The Qurʾān does not even contain the noun ʿaql, only 
the verbal forms ʿaqala and yaʿqilu. When it refers to the intellects of people it usually uses the terms albāb or 
afʾida. 

101.  See Appendix.
102.  See Appendix.



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by the pen.” Similarly, “things are known through the Intellect.” This example shows that 
Ṣadrā and al-Zabīdī spared no effort to bring the divergent traditions into harmony. 

Finally, they use the ḥadīth as inspiration to show that these ideas do not contradict the 
ḥadīth but rather provide the intellectual framework for its full understanding. Both refer 
to the Ṣūfī teaching about the  pre-eternal Muḥammadan reality (ḥaqīqa muḥammadiyya).103 
Many thinkers, such as Ibn ʿArabī, considered the Muḥammadan reality the first entity 
created by God and thus identified it with the Logos, the Intellect, and the Pen, which is also 
the context in which Ṣadrā and al-Zabīdī introduce it. For them, the Muḥammadan reality 
or spirit is the perfect equivalent of the immaterial Intellect. This equation allows further 
symbolic interpretation of the ḥadīth and the synthesis of different traditions. Commenting 
on the part of the ḥadīth that reads “Then He told it: ‘Go back!’” Ṣadrā interprets it as 
referring to the night of Muḥammad’s journey to the divine presence (miʿrāj) and to “his 
departure from the realm of the world.” 

Both commentaries are also imbued with philosophical concepts. Al-Zabīdī’s discussion 
of the nature of the Intellect is a good example. It offers a response to al-Ghazālī, who 
presents the following conundrum: If the Intellect is an accident, how is it possible that 
it was created before everything else? And if it is a substance, “how could it exist on its 
own without occupying space (lā yataḥayyazu)?” Al-Zabīdī, in the tradition of scholastic 
Avicennan philosophy, provides a taxonomy of substances and identifies five types of 
substance—matter, form, body, soul, and intellect—to argue that some substances, such 
as the Intellect, are abstract and therefore do not occupy space. Here, philosophy helps to 
resolve a philosophical problem that the ḥadīth raises; the system is in harmony, and as a 
welcome corollary, the reader has been edified. 

Ṣadrā discusses many of his own philosophical and theological theories, always 
proceeding from the ḥadīth. He takes up the argument that I quoted earlier, about all 
the first creations—the pen, the Intellect, and so on—referring to the same named thing 
(musammā), to launch his discussion about the notions of essence and existence.104  

103. The Muḥammadan reality guides the Prophet (and anyone who wants to follow him) during his ascent to 
the divine presence (miʿrāj), which the tradition links to Q 53:18 and which also appears in Ṣadrā’s commentary. 
The tradition and the commentary also speak about the Muḥammadan light and the Muḥammadan spirit 
as equivalents of the Muḥammadan reality, but some authors have distinguished between the three; see W. 
Chittick, Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-ʿArabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity (Albany: State University of New 
York Press, 1994), chap. 2.

104.  The distinction between essence and existence is already present in the work of Aristotle, but it assumes 
true significance only in the works of al-Fārābī and Avicenna. Posterior Analytics II Β 92b10, Metaphysics, Δ V.5, 
1015a20–b15; 7, 1017a7–b10; also Ε and Z, De interpretatione 11 21a25–28, referred to in O. Lizzini, “Ibn Sina’s 
Metaphysics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition), ed. E. N. Zalta. In particular, 
Avicenna developed the distinction between the existence of something and its “reality by virtue of which 
something is what it is,” that is, its essence, quiddity, thingness. Scholarship on the issue is abundant; see for 
instance, R. Wisnovsky, Avicenna’s Metaphysics in Its Context (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). Mullā 
Ṣadrā’s key contribution to the discussion is the doctrine of the ontological primacy of existence (aṣālat al-wujūd). 
Ṣadrā argued that existence must be ontologically prior because it applies to all things, whereas essence applies 
only to some things, such as genera or species. All things are composites of existence and essence except for God, 
who has no essence (God cannot be a composite, and further, essence implies multiplicity because it is shared 
by a multitude of subjects). Everything is therefore an instantiation of existence, including God’s connection 



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He defines the Intellect as the highest of all created things in terms of its degree of existence, 
for it needs only God and nothing else. He also brings in the doctrine of simple reality (basīṭ 
al-ḥaqīqa), which draws on Neoplatonic ideas of emanation and the sequence of intellects 
and posits that all things flow from the Simple One. God is simple, pure existence devoid 
of quiddity105 that would imply complexity and multiplicity (e.g., genera, composition, 
divisions). All things flow from this simple reality and are both in it and not in it.106 In 
this context of emanation, Ṣadrā invokes the rule of the most noble contingency (qāʿidat 
al-imkān al-ashraf)—namely, that the nobler being must be prior to the less noble in 
grades of existence107—and identifies the Intellect as “the noblest possible and the most 
distinguished creation.” Further, the theme of love, inspired by the part of the ḥadīth 
that says, “I have not created a creature dearer to Me than you are,” takes up a significant 
portion of the discussion. Love, in Ṣadrā’s view, is pure good connected with perfection of 
existence. On this point, he debates earlier theologians and specifically al-Zamakhsharī, who 
claimed love would make God deficient in His essence. Ṣadrā refutes this position: “They did 
not know that His, the Almighty’s, love for His creation stems from His love for Himself.” 
After Him there are the “rational substances, luminous spirits, and holy angels, [all of whom 
are] delighted with Him . . . for they are Divinely Lovers.” In this case, the ḥadīth serves 
Ṣadrā as evidence for his philosophical views. Finally, Ṣadrā interprets the last part of the 
ḥadīth, “It is you whom I order, it is you whom I forbid, it is you whom I punish, and it is 
you whom I reward,” as reflecting the Intellect’s function as the condition for obligation 
(taklīf), although he problematizes the doctrine by distinguishing between obligation of this 
world and rewards in heaven. With Ṣadrā’s discussion of taklīf, the journey of the ḥadīth has 
come full circle.

On this last stop, the ḥadīth has, once more, acquired new meanings and significations, 
this time not by modifying the ḥadīth itself but by collecting and harmonizing its variants 
and weaving it into other intellectual frameworks. For the commentators, the ḥadīth 
posed an occasion to espouse their ideas about the world and a challenge to formulate a 
harmonious system in which ḥadīths, Ṣūfī ideas, and philosophy all had their place.

to the world. This doctrine, which Mullā Ṣadrā used for his own proof of God’s existence, was also informed 
by the Ṣūfī metaphysics of ontological monism (waḥdat al-wujūd) associated with Ibn ʿArabī. Ṣadrā’s monism 
is expressed in the phrase basīṭ al-ḥaqīqa kull al-ashyāʾ (“The simple reality is all things”), which is based on 
Neoplatonic teachings of the simple One. God, as the simple One and pure Being, is the totality of existence. Rizvi, 
“Mulla Sadra”; I. Kalin, Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy: Mullā Ṣadrā on Existence, Intellect, and Intuition 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 89–95.

105.  See previous note.
106.  This doctrine reconciles the tension between the unity of existence and its multiplicity as it appears in 

this world and provides a proof for the existence of God through an analysis of simplicity. The doctrine of basīṭ 
al-ḥaqīqa relates to Ṣadrā’s doctrine of aṣālat al-wujūd (see note 108) as well as to his doctrine of the gradation 
of existence (tashkīk al-wujūd), which posits that all things in the world are different degrees of a single whole, 
in a chain and hierarchy of existence. S. H. Rizvi, Mulla Sadra and Metaphysics: Modulation of Being (London: 
Routledge, 2009), 104–5; Rizvi, “Mulla Sadra.”

107.  Mullā Ṣadrā, al-Ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya fī al-asfār al-ʿaqliyya al-arbaʿa, ed. R. Luṭfī, I. Amīnī, and F. A. Ummīd 
(Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth, 1981), 3:244. See also Rizvi, Mulla Sadra and Metaphysics, 108.



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Conclusion

The ḥadīth about the creation of the Intellect originated in Basra in the first half of 
the second/eighth century. It reflected Muʿtazilī ideas about the Intellect’s obedience to 
God’s will and its ability to distinguish between good and evil—ability that makes it at 
the same time the locus of human obligation to choose good. Around the mid-second/
eighth century or a little after, the ḥadīth was disseminated widely in Sunnī traditionist 
circles in Basra and among Shīʿī ḥadīth collectors in Kufa, and then spread across the whole 
Islamic world, changing meanings and audiences. In the early modern period, its journey 
continued in ḥadīth commentaries, in which the ḥadīth was, once more, reinterpreted to fit 
to a new intellectual context.

Genre matters. The saying gained currency the moment it acquired the form of a ḥadīth. 
Thanks to its ḥadīthization, it could travel across sectarian boundaries and be adapted and 
readapted for diverse contexts. Only as a ḥadīth could it become part of an intersectarian 
common discourse. The fluidity, openness to reinterpretation, and capacity for inspiration 
that the case study of the ʿaql ḥadīth has demonstrated make ḥadīths an effective literary 
vehicle. 

There are, clearly, other aspects of ḥadīths that contribute to making them so compelling. 
One such aspect is the aura of reality that they carry. Stefan Leder observed that the 
apparent reality of the akhbār is achieved by the employment of isnāds and a narrative 
technique that leaves the narrator in the background.108 Daniel Beaumont added that the 
isnād’s function is to “anchor the text to the actual instance of enunciation.”109 These effects 
are naturally magnified in the case of ḥadīths. Stefan Sperl has underlined the isnād’s role of 
holding “the promise of a direct, authentic and virtually unmediated access to the past.”110 
This past is not any past; it is the unmitigated prophetic authority speaking. 

Mircea Eliade’s ideas about two types of time, sacred and profane, further illuminates 
the emotional power of ḥadīths. Religious rites and services mark a break in profane time, 
and by reenacting events that took place in sacred time, they take participants back to that 
time.111 All narration of ḥadīths is a similar practice, a ritual through which a community is 
transmitted to a different temporal sphere. Eliade notes that Christianity, with its insistence 
on the historicity of Christ, radically changed the conception of sacred time. Whereas 
people had―through their rites and myths―traditionally striven to return to a primordial 
cosmic time, Christianity sanctified a clearly defined historical time.112 The same can be said 

108.  S. Leder, “The Literary Use of the Khabar: A Basic Form of Historical Writing,” in The Byzantine and 
Early Islamic Near East, vol. 1, Problems in the Literary Source Material, ed. A. Cameron and L. Conrad, 277–315 
(Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1992), 307–8. 

109.  D. Beaumont, “Hard-Boiled: Narrative Discourse in Early Muslim Traditions,” Studia Islamica 83 (1996): 
5–31, at 28. 

110.  S. Sperl, “Man’s ‘Hollow Core’: Ethics and Aesthetics in Ḥadīth Literature and Classical Arabic Adab,” 
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 70, no. 3 (2007): 459–86, at 480. 

111.  M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. W. R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, 
Brace and World, 1959), 68 ff. 

112.  Eliade, Sacred and Profane, 111. 



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about Islam and the time of the Prophet, and from this perspective, isnāds serve as a direct 
connection to this sanctified historical past, as a time machine that takes one back to the 
sacred time of the first Muslim generation. The act of ḥadīth narration transforms into an 
experience of encountering the Prophet. The case of the ʿaql ḥadīth is different. The ḥadīth 
goes even a step further, for it takes the listeners to Eliade’s primordial cosmic time, to the 
moment of first creation, in the beginning. 



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Appendix: Translation

First text: Sharḥ Uṣūl al-Kāfī by Mullā Ṣadrā (Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Shīrāzī)113

K114: Several of our companions115 [i.e., Shīʿīs], including Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā al-ʿAṭṭār, 
narrated to me (ḥaddathanī): 

Ṣ: [Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā al-ʿAṭṭār is] Abū Jaʿfar al-Qummī [fl. before 300/913], [about 
whom it is said] in al-Khulāṣa [by al-Ḥillī, d. 726/1325]116 and other works [that he is] the 
master among our companions in his time,

K: reliable (thiqa),
Ṣ: the source of many ḥadīths (ʿayn kathīr al-ḥadīth),
K: on the authority of Aḥmad b. Muḥammad,
Ṣ: [who is] Ibn ʿĪsā b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Saʿd b. Mālik al-Aḥwaṣ, with ḥāʾ and ṣād muhmalatān 

[i.e., without diacritical points], whose kunya is Abū Jaʿfar al-Qummī, the shaykh of Qum. 
He was one of its prominent men and its faqīh. He met Abū al-Ḥasan al-Riḍā [d. 202/817, 
the eighth imam] and Abū Jaʿfar al-Thānī [d. 220/835, the ninth imam] and Abū al-Ḥasan 
al-ʿAskarī [d. 254/868, the tenth imam], peace be upon them. He was reliable (thiqa) and 
wrote books. 

K: on the authority of al-Ḥasan b. Maḥbūb,
Ṣ: [who is] al-Sarrād, called al-Zarrād, whose kunya is Abū ʿAlī Kūfī, a reliable source, who 

narrated on the authority of al-Riḍā, peace be upon him. He [al-Ḥasan] was of noble standing, 
and is considered one of the four pillars of his era.117 Al-Kashshī said: “Our companions 
agreed on approving what is narrated truly on their authority118 and on assenting to them, 
and they [i.e., our companions] endorsed their legal opinions (fiqh) and their learning,” 
and he mentioned al-Ḥasan b. Maḥbūb as one of this group. [Al-Kashshī added:] “Some 
mentioned in his place al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Faḍḍāl.” 

K: on the authority of al-ʿAlāʾ b. Razīn, 
Ṣ: the first letter [in Razīn] being rāʾ and the following zāʾ; he was reliable (thiqa), of 

noble standing (jalīl al-qadr), and a prominent man (wajh), 
K: on the authority of Muḥammad b. Muslim,

113.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Sharḥ Uṣūl al-Kāfī, 215–19.
114.  Ṣ stands for Mullā Ṣadrā, K stands for al-Kulaynī. In the original text al-Kulaynī’s words are  distinguished 

by double parentheses. 
115.  Shīʿī ḥadīth scholars in general take the expression “several of our companions” used by al-Kulaynī 

to refer to five specific people (including Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā al-ʿAṭṭār) when narrating from Aḥmad b. 
Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā; see the introduction to al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī, 48.

116.  Cf. al-ʿAllāma al-Ḥillī, Khulāṣat al-aqwāl fī maʿrifat al-rijāl, ed. J. al-Qayyūmī (Qum: Muʾassasat al-Nashr 
al-Islāmī, 1417H), 61. 

117.  Cf. al-Ḥillī, al-Khulāṣa, 97. 
118.  “They” in al-Kashshī’s text are not in fact the four pillars. Mullā Ṣadrā and his source, al-Ḥillī, somewhat 

misquote al-Kashshī here, because al-Kashshī is referring to the six most reliable members of the second 
generation in transmitting Imāmī traditions. Cf. al-Ḥillī, al-Khulāṣa, 97; Muḥammad al-Kashshī, Rijāl al-Kashshī, 
ed. A. al-Ḥusaynī (Karbala: Muʾassasat al-Aʿlamī li-l-Maṭbūʿāt, 1962), 556. 



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Ṣ: [Muḥammad b. Muslim] b. Ribāḥ Abū Jaʿfar, one of the prominent companions of 
Kūfa, a pious faqīh, a companion of Abū Jaʿfar [Imam al-Bāqir] and Abū ʿAbd Allāh [Imam 
al-Ṣādiq], peace be upon them. He narrated on their authority, and he was one of the most 
reliable people. 

Al-Kashshī [d. ca. 350/961] narrated with an isnād reaching al-ʿAlāʾ b. Razīn from ʿAbd 
Allāh b. Abī Yaʿfūr that he said: “I said to Abū ʿAbd Allāh [Imam al-Ṣādiq], peace be upon 
him: ‘I cannot meet you every time and [sometimes] coming is impossible, and [then] 
a man from among our companions comes and asks me, and I do not always have the 
answer to everything119 that he is asking about.’ He [Imam al-Ṣādiq] said: ‘What prevents 
you from [going to] Muḥammad b. Muslim? For he has heard ḥadīth from my father  
[i.e., Imam al-Bāqir] and according to him, he [Muḥammad b. Muslim] was a prominent 
man.’”120 And [al-Kashshī narrated also] on the authority of Abū Jaʿfar b. Qawlawayh, with the 
isnād reaching ʿAlī b. Asbāṭ on the authority of his father, Asbāṭ b. Sālim, that Abū al-Ḥasan 
Mūsā b. Jaʿfar, peace be upon them, said: “Muḥammad b. Muslim is one of the disciples 
(ḥawāriyyūn)121 of Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. ʿAlī [i.e., Imam al-Bāqir] and his son [Imam] 
Jaʿfar b. Muḥammad al-Ṣādiq, peace be upon them.” Al-Kashshī said: “He [Muḥammad 
b. Muslim] is one of those on whose reliability the community (ʿiṣāba) agrees and whose 
knowledge/legal opinions (fiqh) it follows.”122

K: that [Imam] Abū Jaʿfar, peace be upon him, said: “When God created the Intellect, 
he made it speak and then He told it: ‘Come forward!’ And it came forward. Then He told 
it: ‘Go back!’ And it went back. Then He said: ‘By My Might and by My Glory, I have not 
created a creature dearer to Me than you are. I perfected you only in those I love. It is you 
(iyyāka) whom I order, it is you whom I forbid, it is you whom I punish, and it is you whom 
I reward.’”

Ṣ: Commentary
O my brothers, walking the path of God on the feet of gnosis (ʿirfān), know that this 

Intellect is the first creation, the closest of the created things (majʿūlāt) to the First 
Truth, the greatest, the most perfect, and the second among the existents in existentiality 
(mawjūdiyya)—although the Almighty has no second in His reality (fī ḥaqīqatihi) because 
His oneness (waḥda) is not countable (ʿadadiyya) as others in the genus of countable things 
(waḥdāt) are. And this is what is meant in what has come to us in the ḥadīths from him 
[the Prophet], may God bless him and his family, and in his sayings in the version, “The 
first thing that God created was the Intellect,” and in the version, “The first thing that God 
created was my light,” and in the version, “The first thing that God created was my spirit,” 
and in the version, “The first thing that God created was the pen,” and in the version, 
“The first thing that God created was a cherub (karūbī).” All of these are attributes and 
descriptions of one thing in different phrasings. It is called by a different name in reference 

119.  Kulla mā rather than kullamā, as in the published text. 
120.  Cf. Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭūṣī, Ikhtiyār maʿrifat al-rijāl, ed. M. al-Rajāʾī (Qum: Muʾassasat Āl al-Bayt, 1404H), 

1:383. 
121.  Ḥawāriyyūn is also the term for the twelve Apostles of Jesus in Arabic. 
122.  Cf. al-Kashshī, Rijāl, 10.



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to each attribute. The names are multiple, while the named (musammā) is one in essence 
(dhāt) [1] and existence (wujūd) [2].

[1] As for the quiddity (māhiyya) and essence [of the Intellect], it is a substance (jawhar) 
that has no relation of any kind to bodies (ajsām): not in terms of existence, like accidents, 
and not in terms of actions (taṣarruf), and not in terms of governance, like souls, and not in 
terms of particularity (juzʾiyya) or mixing (imtizāj), like matter and form. 

In general: The substantial created things (majʿūlāt jawhariyya) fall into three groups, 
differentiated on the basis of their degrees of existence. The first and highest of them is one 
that needs only God and does not look to anything except God, and does not pay attention 
to anything but the Almighty.

The second is one that needs only the Almighty for its mere existence (aṣl al-wujūd). But 
in perfecting its existence (fī istikmāl wujūdihi) it does need what is other than God. The 
perfection of its existence [comes] after its mere existence, [but from another perspective] 
it [the perfection of its existence] comes before it. 

And the third is one that needs what is other than the Almighty in both matters—that is, 
in the basis of existence and in its perfection. 

The first one is the Intellect, the second one is the soul, and the third one is the body or 
its part. 

[2] As for the existence (wujūd) and the reality (ḥaqīqa), their proof is the existence 
of the Almighty Reality. For since the One with the Simple Reality (basīṭ al-ḥaqīqa)123 is 
knowing, powerful, magnanimous, and merciful; possessed of supreme virtue, great force, 
and boundless power; and encompassing all virtues, good qualities, and perfections, it is not 
possible for Him, given His noble nature, mercy, and compassion, to refrain from emanation 
(fayḍ) and mercy or to be sparing124 of the good and generosity toward the worlds. So 
it is inevitable that beings emanate from Him in the best order and in the most perfect 
arrangement and [it is inevitable that] He begins with the noblest (ashraf) and proceeds to 
the next noblest, as the principle of most noble contingency (qāʿidat al-imkān al-ashraf) 
dictates.125

There is no doubt that the noblest possible being and the most distinguished creation 
is the Intellect, as you know. For it is the first of the emanations (ṣawādir) and the closest 
and dearest to the Truth. And that is why He said: “I have not created a creature dearer to 
Me than you are.” And we will repeat this saying in order to investigate God’s love for his 
creation. This existent’s reality (ḥaqīqa) is the same as the very reality of the Great Spirit, 
a matter that has been pointed out in the Almighty’s saying: “Say: ‘The spirit [cometh]  
by command of my Lord’” [Q 17:85]126 and his saying: “Is it not His to create and    

123.  See my earlier discussion of Ṣadrā’s doctrine of the simple reality, basīṭ al-ḥaqīqa”
124.  Reading yaḍinnu for yaẓunnu. 
125.  For the principle of the most noble contingency, see Mullā Ṣadrā, al-Ḥikma al-mutaʿāliya, 3:244. See also 

Rizvi, Mulla Sadra and Metaphysics, 108. 
126.  Q 17:85 reads as follows: “They ask thee concerning the Spirit [of inspiration]. Say: ‘The Spirit [cometh] 

by command of my Lord; of knowledge it is only a little that is communicated to you, [O men!]’”



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to govern?” [Q  7: 54],127 and it [the Intellect] was referred to as the pen only because it is the 
tool ofTruth to represent the truths (al-ʿulūm wa-l-ḥaqāʾiq) on the spiritual tablets of divine 
decree and of fate (al-alwāḥ al-nafsāniyya al-qaḍāʾiyya wa-l-qadariyya).128

Indeed, the “pen” of God is neither cane nor iron nor a different body. Likewise, His 
tablet is not made of wood or papyrus. When He called it “pen,” He said: “Let come to pass 
what will come to pass until the Day of Judgment.”

[Furthermore,] because it [the Intellect] is an existence free of the darkness of corporeality 
and concealment and of the darkness of shortcomings and inexistence, it is called “light” 
(nūr). For light is existence and darkness inexistence, and it is apparent to itself and makes 
other things apparent. 

Because it [the Intellect] is the origin of life of high and low souls alike, it is called “spirit” 
(rūḥ). It [the Intellect] is also the Muḥammadan reality (ḥaqīqa muḥammadiyya) in the view 
of the greatest and the most accomplished (muḥaqqiq) Ṣūfīs because it is the perfection of 
his [Muḥammad’s] existence, may God bless him and his family, which commences from 
Him and returns to Him, as shown in some ḥadīths of the Imams, peace be upon them. 
On this topic [we have undertaken] a demonstrative investigation (taḥqīq burhānī) whose 
discussion would lengthen our discourse, and we will come back to it in the explanation of 
those ḥadīths. 

Whoever scrutinizes this point finds that how the First Intellect has been described and 
what has been narrated about it correspond to the characteristics of his [Muḥammad’s] 
spirit, may God bless him and his family, and His peace be upon him. And [the Imam’s] 
saying, peace be upon him, “He [God] made it [the Intellect] speak (istanṭaqahu),” means that 
He endowed it with speech/reason and discourse (jaʿalahu dhā nuṭq wa-kalām) appropriate 
to its status. As for his words, “Then He told it: ‘Come forward!’ And it came forward. Then 
He told it: ‘Go back!’ And it went back,” this was the case with the spirit [i.e., the Prophet], 
may God bless him and his family, when God told him: “Come to the world and descend 
on Earth as a mercy to the two worlds [of human beings and jinns]!” And he came, and his 
light was concealed in each prophet, while in the person described [as Muḥammad] it was 
apparent, as in the statement reported from him, “We are the last ones and the first ones,” 
meaning the last ones to come out and appear, like a fruit, and the first ones in creation and 
existence, like a seed. So, he [Muḥammad] is the seed of the tree of the world. 

“Then He told him: ‘Go back!’” This meant: “Return to your Lord!” And he [Muḥammad] 
turned away from the world and returned to his Lord on the night of miʿrāj and on his 
departure from the realm of the world. 

Then He said: “By My power and by My glory, I have not created a creature dearer to Me 
than you are.” And this was also his [Muḥammad’s] case, may God bless him and his family, 
because he was God’s beloved and the most beloved among His creatures. 

127.  Q 7:54 reads as follows: “Your Guardian Lord is God, Who created the heavens and the earth in six Days; 
then He established Himself on the Throne [of authority]: He draweth the night as a veil over the day, each 
seeking the other in rapid succession; He created the sun, the moon, and the stars, [all] governed by laws under 
His command. Is it not His to create and to govern? Blessed be God, the cherisher and sustainer of the worlds!”

128.  As Muḥammad Khawājawī, the editor of Ṣadrā’s text, points out, by the two types of spiritual tablets 
Ṣadrā refers to universal souls and to the universe’s faculty of imagination. 



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The rational aspect in this is that love belongs to the perception of existence (idrāk 
al-wujūd) because it is pure good.129 And everything130 with a more perfect existence is also 
greater in goodness, stronger in the perception of it, and more intensive in its delight in 
it. And the most sublime [thing] delighted by itself is the First Truth (al-ḥaqq al-awwal), 
because It/He perceives most intensely the greatest of what there is to be perceived. It/
He has the most perfect virtue, the most shining light, and the most elevated sublimity, 
and it is pure good. After It/Him in goodness, existence, perception, and delight are the 
rational substances (jawāhir ʿaqliyya), luminous spirits (arwāḥ nūriyya), and holy angels 
(malāʾik qudsiyya), [all of whom are] delighted with Him, the Almighty, and with themselves 
through their being delighted with Him, for they are Divinely Lovers (ʿushshāq ilāhiyyūn). 
After their level there is the level of the souls yearning for Him (nufūs mushtāqūn ilayhi), 
the Almighty, [which varies] according to their attainment and perception of Him; they are 
the heavenly angels. And after those—in terms of passion for Him, the Almighty—there are 
human souls and the happy among the lords of right (aṣḥāb al-yamīn) possessing different 
degrees of faith in God, the Almighty.131 

As for those close to God (muqarrabūn) among the human souls in the hereafter, who 
are the lords of spiritual ascent, their position in the afterlife will be like that of the angels, 
who are close to the Almighty in terms of love and delight in Him. If you know this, then 
[you know that] the love of God, the Almighty, for His servants stems from His love for 
Himself. For since it has been established that the thing dearest to Him, the Almighty, is 
Himself and that He is most delighted with Himself, [and since it has been established] that 
whoever loves something loves all of its actions, movements, and effects for the sake of 
the beloved and that what is closer to Him is [also] dearer to Him, and [since it has been 
established] that all contingents (mumkināt) of different levels are the effects of Truth 
and His actions, for God loves them for His own sake, and [it has been established that] the 
creation closest to Him is the Muḥammadan spirit, may God bless him and his family, here 
called the “Intellect”—[in view of all of the above, it follows that] it is true that he is the 
creature dearest to Him. 

There are some theologians, such as al-Zamakhsharī and his contemporaries, who have 
denied God’s love for His servants, claiming that it would necessarily imply that He is 
deficient in His essence. [But] they did not know that His, the Almighty’s, love for His 
creation stems from His love for Himself. 

[Consider] His saying in another version: “Through you I know, through you I take, 
through you I give, and through you I reward.” All of this applies to the Prophet, may God 
bless him and his family, for who does not know the Prophet, may God bless him and his 
family, in his prophecy and message does not know God as he should, even if he had a 

129.  Love in Mullā Ṣadrā’s thought is seen in cosmological terms as penetrating all beings. It is the innate 
natural tendency of all things to reach their natural perfection. 

130.  Reading kullu mā for kullamā.
131.  There are two possible explanations for the term “lords of right” (aṣḥāb al-yamīn). The first is that 

they are those who are given the book in their right hand on the Day of Judgment; that is, they are in great 
standing before God. The other is that they are people bestowed with great blessings. See J. al-Subḥānī, Mafāhīm 
al-Qurʾān (Qum: Muʾassasat al-Imām al-Ṣādiq, 2000), 363–65. 



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thousand proofs for the ways of knowing God! The meaning [of these words] is: “I [God] 
am known through knowing you [Muḥammad].” That means, “Who knows you in your 
prophecy knows Me in my Lordship.” “Through you I take” means, “I take the obedience of 
the one who took from you what you were given of religion and law.” And “Through you I 
give” means, “I give, by way of your intercession, a level to the people of levels [i.e., I elevate 
them from their level to a higher one in heaven], as he [Muḥammad] said: “[All] people, 
even Abraham, peace be upon him, need my intercession!” and “Through you I punish and 
through you I reward.” And this is [the manifestation] of the words of the Almighty: 

Behold! God took the covenant of the Prophets, saying: “I give you a Book and Wisdom; 
then comes to you a Messenger, confirming what is with you; do ye believe him and 
render him help?” God said: “Do ye agree, and take this, My Covenant, as binding on 
you?” They said: “We agree.” He said: “Then bear witness and I am with you among the 
witnesses.” [Q 3:81] 

This is because God, the Almighty, made a covenant with each prophet He sent to a 
group of people (qawm) so that they would believe in Muḥammad and his family, may God 
bless them, and to entrust his community (umma) with faith in him and with support for 
his religion. And whoever believed in him among the nations of the past before his mission 
and among the bygone nations belongs to the people of reward (ahl al-thawāb), whereas 
whoever did not believe in him among the ancient and the recent ones belongs to the 
people of punishment. So His words are true: “Through you I punish and through you I 
reward.” 

As for his words in this version, “It is you (iyyāka) whom I order, it is you whom I forbid, 
it is you whom I punish, and it is you whom I reward,” it is probable that the word “you” 
here means “through you” (bika) and “for your sake” (min ajlika) by way of extension. If we 
took this expression literally, it would also be true and correct, because the reality of the 
Intellect is the condition for obligation (malāk al-taklīf) [and for] order, probation, reward, 
and punishment. However, its reality has [various] stations and levels, since the oneness 
of the Intellect is not a numerical oneness. Its [the Intellect’s] being the thing dearest to 
Him, the Almighty, is with regard to its utmost perfection and closeness to the First, the 
Almighty; its being punished and tortured is with regard to its distance from Him, the 
Almighty; its being obligated (mukallaf), commissioned, and forbidden is with regard to its 
position in the house of obligation [i.e., this world]; and its being rewarded is with regard to 
its being in the hereafter in levels of heaven.132

132.  In this paragraph, Mullā Ṣadrā interprets the last sentence of the ḥadīth. He recognizes its reference to 
the notion of taklīf, discussed earlier. The complication that he tackles here lies in the fact that the ḥadīth, in 
this version, seems to treat the Intellect, not the human being, as the immediate mukallaf, the subject of divine 
reward and punishment. Ṣadrā proposes two possible explanations: what is meant is either that the Intellect is 
the tool of fulfilling obligations or that the Intellect is the immediate subject of obligation by way of being the 
condition for it. If the latter is the case, the question how the Intellect can be rewarded and punished is raised. 
Ṣadrā explains that reward and punishment consist of either closeness to or distance from God. 



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Second text: Itḥāf al-sāda al-muttaqīn by Muḥammad b. Muḥammad al-Ḥusaynī al-Zabīdī133

G134: [The Prophet] said, may God honor him and grant him peace: “O people, reason 
(aʿqilū ʿan) through your Lord.” 

Z: That is, learn and understand through Him, for it is said: “I have reasoned [i.e., 
understood] something through Him.” 

G: And advise one another [to cherish] the Intellect!
Z: That is, its perfection. 
G: Know through it what you were ordered and through it what you were forbidden, and 

know that it
Z: that is, the Intellect
G: is your savior before your Lord.
Z: [It is found] in this way in al-ʿIrāqī’s edition, but in others [it is found as] “aids you 

before God.”
G: And know that a rational person is one who obeys God even if he were of a misshapen
Z: with al-dāl al-muhmala [the letter dāl without a diacritical point], that is, ugly
G: appearance,
Z: with regard to what is apparent in him
G: of little importance,
Z: that is, in standing and value 
G: of low rank, 
Z: that is, of miserable rank
G: and of shabby exterior.
Z: with regard to his clothes and how much toil and hardship he has had to endure, 

which has made him disheveled
G: And verily the ignorant
Z: he [al-Ghazālī] included the ignorant as the opposite of the rational because Knowledge 

and the Intellect come from one source, as we have pointed out above 
G: [is the one] who disobeys God, even if he is of a beautiful appearance, of great 

importance, of a noble rank, and of a handsome exterior,
Z: These [features—misshapen appearance, little importance, low rank, and a shabby 

exterior] are four descriptions in opposition to four descriptions [namely, beautiful 
appearance, great importance, noble rank, and a handsome exterior]. For the first thing 
that thrills man is the beauty of his looks, and if, in addition, his importance is great, this 
is the highest position, and through it he will reach a noble rank and a handsome exterior. 
Then he [al-Ghazālī] adds another two descriptions, saying: 

G: eloquent and articulate. 
Z: And what a hideous man is one whose corporeal prison is—in comparison with the 

ugliness of his soul—a paradise in which an owl resides, a sacred place protected by a wolf, 
as a wise man [once] said to an ignorant with a graceful face: “The house is good, but its 
resident is wicked.” And how hideous of him that he is concerned with the amount of his 

133.  Al-Zabīdī, Itḥāf al-sāda al-muttaqīn, 452-455.
134.  G stands for al-Ghazālī and Z for al-Zabīdī. 



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wealth and the excellence of his possessions (athāth). Verily, some wise people called the 
rich billy goats whose wool is pearls and donkeys whose excrement is silken shawls.” 

G: Monkeys and pigs are more rational (aʿqalu) before God than is a person who disobeys 
Him.

Z: For it is disgraceful (qabīḥ) for a rational man (dhū al-ʿaql) to be a beast when it is 
surely possible for him to be a human being, and [it is disgraceful for a rational man] to be a 
human being when he has the potential to become an angel. 

For we have not seen among the flaws of people a failing 
equal to the failing of those who are capable of perfection.135

G: And do not be seduced by the glorification of you by the people of the world, for they 
are among the losers. 

Z: Al-ʿIrāqī said: 

It was narrated to us in the Kitāb al-ʿAql by Dāwūd b. al-Muḥabbir136 in the version 
(riwāya) of Abū al-Zanād [d. ca. 130/748] on the authority of al-Aʿraj [d. ca. 117/735] 
on the authority of Abū Hurayra on the authority of the Prophet, may God honor him 
and grant him peace, that he [too] said this, except that he said, “indeed they were 
considered among the losers,” and al-Ḥārith b. Abī Usāma narrated it in his Musnad on 
the authority of Dāwūd b. al-Muḥabbir.137 

There was disagreement about Dāwūd b. al-Muḥabbir. ʿAbbās al-Dawrī narrated on the 
authority of Yaḥyā b. Maʿīn [d. 233/847], who said that he was a known transmitter, 
but then he left it [the practice of ḥadīth transmission] and became associated with a 
group of the Muʿtazila (ṣaḥaba qawman min al-muʿtazila). “They corrupted him, but 
he is reliable.” 

Abū Dāwūd [al-Sijistānī, d. 275/888] said: “He is reliable, though he appears weak” (thiqa 
shibh ḍaʿīf). 

Aḥmad [b. Ḥanbal, d. 241/855] said: “He does not know what ḥadīth is” (lā yadrī mā 
al-ḥadīth). 

Al-Dāraquṭnī [d. 385/995] said: “His ḥadīths are to be abandoned” (matrūk).
ʿAbd al-Ghanī b. Saʿīd al-Azdī al-Miṣrī [d. 409/1019] narrated on the authority of 

al-Dāraquṭnī that he said: “Four men forged (waḍaʿa) Kitāb al-ʿAql. Maysara b. ʿAbd Rabbihi 
was the first of them, then Dāwūd b. al-Muḥabbir stole it and attached to it isnāds different 
from Maysara’s, then ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Abī Rajāʾ stole it and attached to it other isnāds, then 
Sulaymān b. ʿIsā al-Sanjarī stole it and invented other isnāds,” or as he [al-Dāraquṭnī] said.

135.  This a verse from a poem by Abū al-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī, which starts Malūmukumā yajillu ʿan 
al-malāmī See Abū al-Ṭayyib al-Mutanabbī, Dīwān al-Mutanabbī (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1964), 483. 

136.  See my earlier discussion of Dāwūd b. al-Muḥabbir. 
137.  Cf. al-Ḥārith b. Abī Usāma, Bughyat al-bāḥith ʿ an zawāʾid Musnad al-Ḥārith, ed. M. al-Saʿdānī (Cairo: Dār 

al-Ṭalāʾiʿ, n.d.), 257, no. 833.



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According to what al-Dāraquṭnī said, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Abī Rajāʾ stole it from Dāwūd. He 
shortened it, created another isnād for it, and narrated it on the authority of Mālik, on the 
authority of Suhayl, on the authority of his father, on the authority of Abū Hurayra and Abū 
Saʿīd al-Khudrī [d. ca. 74/694] that they said: “The Messenger of God, may God honor him 
and grant him peace, said: ‘Son of Adam, obey your Lord and you will be called rational; 
do not disobey Him, [otherwise] you will be called ignorant.” Abū Nuʿaym [al-Iṣbahānī, d. 
430/1038] narrated it in his Ḥilya and al-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī [d. 463/1071] in [his] Asmāʾ 
man rawā ʿan Mālik [“Names of those who transmitted ḥadīth from Mālik”]138 through the 
narration (riwāya) of the abovementioned Ibn Abī Rajāʾ.139 Al-Khaṭīb said: “This ḥadīth is to 
be rejected (munkar) from the corpus of Mālik [b. Anas]’s ḥadīths.” 

Al-Dāraquṭnī said: “Abd al-ʿAzīz b. Abī Rajāʾ’s ḥadīths are to be abandoned” (matrūk).
Al-Dhahabī [d. 748/1348] said in his al-Mīzān:140 “It is falsely attributed to Mālik [b. Anas]” 

(bāṭil ʿalā Mālik).
Z: I say that the kunya of Dāwūd b. al-Muḥabbir b. Mukharram al-Bakrāwī was Abū 

Sulaymān al-Baṣrī. He was a resident of Baghdād, and he died in the year 206 [821]. Muḥabbir 
is [to be read] as muḥaddith. His father narrated on the authority Hishām b. ʿUrwa [d. 
146/763], and his son Dāwūd narrated on the authority of Shuʿba [b. al-Ḥajjāj, d. 160/776] 
and Hammām and several others, and on the authority of Muqātil b. Sulaymān [d. 150/767]. 
Abū Umayya and al-Ḥārith b. Abī Usāma and several others narrated on his authority. 
Al-Dhahabī mentioned in his Mīzān through his [Dāwūd’s] narration a ḥadīth about the 
virtue of Qazwīn, which Ibn Māja recorded (akhrajahu)141 in his Sunan. Then he [al-Dhahabī] 
said: “Verily, Ibn Māja disgraced his Sunan by adding this forged ḥadīth to it.” All ḥadīths of 
Maysara and Ibn Abī Rajāʾ and Sulaymān b. ʿĪsā are to be abandoned.

G: The Messenger of God, may God honor him and grant him peace, said: “The first thing 
that God created was the Intellect. He told it: ‘Come forward.’ And it came forward. Then 
He told it: ‘Go back!’ And it went back. Then God said: ‘By My Might and by My Glory, I have 
not created a creature dearer to Me than you are. Through you I take, through you I give, 
through you I reward, and through you I punish.’”

Z: Shaykh Najm al-Dīn [d. 654/1256],142 the narrator of this ḥadīth, may God’s mercy be 
upon him, said:

138.  This book has not come down to us. Ibn Rashīd al-ʿAṭṭār al-Qurashī produced an abridgment of it, 
removing the isnāds. Ibn Rasḥīd al-ʿAṭṭār al-Qurashī, Mujarrad Asmāʾ al-ruwāt ʿan Mālik li-l-Khaṭīb al-Baghdādī, 
ed. M. S. b. A. al-Salafī (Medina: Maktabat al-Ghurabāʾ al-Athariyya, 1997). 

139.  Cf. Abū Nuʿaym al-Iṣfahānī, Ḥilyat al-awliyāʾ wa-ṭabaqāt al-aṣfiyāʾ (Cairo: Maktabat al-Khānjī, 1932–38), 
7:318.

140.  Al-Dhahabī, Mīzān al-iʿtidāl fī naqd al-rijāl, ed. ʿA. M. al-Bajāwī (Cairo: al-Bābī al-Ḥalabī, 1963), 2:628.
141.  Akhraja means recording a report with the isnād.
142.  This is Najm al-Dīn Abī Bakr ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad b. Shāhawar al-Rāzī al-Azadī, d. 654/1256. See his 

Manārāt al-sāʾirīn ilā ḥaḍrat Allāh wa-maqāmāt al-ṭāʾirīn (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2004), 38; J. Curry, 
The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University 
Press, 2010), 264, n. 61. 



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On the basis of this, it has been concluded that the Intellect is preparatory for 
receiving revelation and believing in it. Another version reads: “And through you, I 
am worshipped.” That is, it [the Intellect] was the first to whom God allotted revelation, 
speech (khiṭāb), love, knowledge, worship, veneration, and the prophecy of the messages 
of Almighty Truth, as He told it to know itself and its Lord. And if you saw in depth 
and relied on the light of God you would realize that knowledge [comes] through the 
Intellect and that the one that is described by the allotment of inspiration, speech, love, 
knowledge, worship, veneration, and prophecy is the spirit of God’ beloved and His 
Prophet Muḥammad, may God honor him and grant him peace. For he is the one who 
said: “The first thing that God created was my spirit,” and in a different version, “my 
light.” For his [Muḥammad’s] spirit is luminous essence and his light is the Intellect 
and he is an accident in his substance (ʿaraḍ qāʾim fī jawharihi).143 That is why [the 
Prophet], may God honor him and grant him peace, said: “I was a prophet [already] 
while Adam was still between spirit and body.”144 That is, he was neither spirit nor body 
yet. That is why he [the Prophet] said: “The one who knows his soul indeed knows his 
Lord.” For it [the Intellect] knew its soul because God made it know it, when He said to 
it: “I have not created a creature dearer to Me than you are.” It also knew God through 
God’s making himself knowable to it when He said: “By My Might and by My Glory, 
I have not created a creature dearer to Me than you are.” So, it [the Intellect] knew 
that He is God, whose attributes include might, glory, power of creation, and love, 
and that He is known to every gnostic (ʿārif), and that He has the power and authority 
to take, to give, to reward, and to punish, and that He is the One who deserves to be 
worshipped. It has reached us from the accounts of some great masters that the first 
creation was a cherub (karūbī), called the Intellect, and that he was the lord of the pen, 
as is demonstrated by the words: “‘Come forward!’ And it came forward. Then He told 
it: ‘Go back!’ And it went back.’” And when He called it [the Intellect] the pen, He told 
it: “Tell what will come to pass [from now] until the Day of Judgment.” Calling it “pen” 
is like calling the owner of a sword “sword.” Also, it is not unlikely that the spirit of 
God’s Prophet, may God honor him and grant him peace, is called “angel” because of 
the large quantity of his angelic attributes, in the same way as Gabriel, peace be upon 
him, is called “spirit” because of the predominance of his spirituality. As we say, one is 
a flame of fire because of the sharpness of his mind. Likewise, he [the Prophet] is called 
“Intellect” because of the abundance of his intellect and “pen” because he writes what 
is being created, and he is called “light” for his illumination. “The Intellect” may be 
understood in language as “the reasoning” (ʿāqil), so on the basis of this assessment 
and interpretation the Prophet’s spirit, may God honor him and grant him peace, is the 
first creation. Understood as such, it is, however, also “angel,” “Intellect,” “light,” and 
“pen.” Pen is close in its meaning to the Intellect. For the Almighty God said: “He taught 
by the pen,” as has come down to us in the exegesis of some; that is, by the Intellect,

143.  As in Mullā Ṣadrā’s commentary, the Ṣūfī notion of the Muḥammadan spirit appears here. 
144.  Cf. John 8:58: “‘Very truly I tell you,’ Jesus answered, ‘before Abraham was born, I am!’”



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because things are known through the Intellect. In His saying: “Come forward, and so 
on” there is an allusion to the fact that the Intellect encompasses both “coming” and 
“going.” The devoted inherited its “coming,” and they are the predecessors close to 
God who were among the prophets and the saints, and they are the lords of right and 
the people of Paradise. The negligent inherited its “going,” and they are the lords of 
left (mashʾama) and the people of Hell, to which the following words of the Almighty 
God allude: “And you became of three classes,” and so on [Q 56:7].

Z: I transmitted his [Najm al-Dīn’s] account in its entirety because of its logical 
interconnectedness and its usefulness. As for the recording (takhrīj) of the ḥadīth, al-ʿIrāqī 
said:

It was narrated on the authority of Abū Umāma, ʿĀʾisha, Abū Hurayra, Ibn ʿAbbās, and 
al-Ḥasan on the authority of several of the Companions. The ḥadīth of Abū Umāma, in 
turn, was narrated by al-Ṭabarānī in al-Awsaṭ145 and by Abū al-Shaykh [b. Ḥibbān] in his 
Kitāb Faḍāʾil al-aʿmāl from the narration of Saʿīd b. al-Faḍl al-Qurashī, who said: “ʿUmar 
b. Abī Sāliḥ al-ʿAtakī related to us on the authority of Abū Ghālib on the authority of 
Abū Umāma that he said: ‘The Messenger of God, may God honor him and grant him 
peace, said:“When God created the Intellect,” but [in this version] He [God] did not say, 
‘by My Glory,’ but rather said, ‘[there is no creature] more wonderful (aʿjabu) to me 
than you are,’ and ‘through you [there is] reward and punishment.’” ʿUmar b. Abī Ṣāliḥ 
[al-ʿAtakī] was mentioned by al-ʿUqaylī in al-Ḍuʿafāʾ, and he recorded this ḥadīth as his 
(awrada lahu hādhā al-ḥadīth).146 

Al-Dhahabī said in al-Mīzān: “He [ʿUmar] is not known” (lā yuʿrafu). And he then 
said that the narrator on the authority of ʿUmar b. Abī Ṣāliḥ [al-ʿAtakī] is among the 
unknown147 and that the story [i.e., the ḥadīth] is false (al-khabar bāṭil). 

Z: I say that al-ʿUqaylī’s exact wording in al-Ḍuʿafāʾ is: “This ḥadīth is to be rejected 
(munkar).”148 ʿUmar and Saʿīd, who narrated on his authority, are entirely unknown in the 
field of transmission (fī al-naql), and he [Saʿīd] has not been corroborated by anyone else 
[in narrating this ḥadīth], and it [the ḥadīth] is not sound (lā yutābaʿu ʿalā ḥadīthihi wa-lā 
yuthbatu). 

Then al-ʿIrāqī said: 

As for ʿĀʾisha’s ḥadīth, Abū Nuʿaym narrated it in his al-Ḥilya and he said: “Abū Bakr 
ʿAbd Allāh b. Yaḥyā b. Muʿāwiya al-Ṭalḥī informed us that al-Dāraquṭnī told him 
(bi-ifādat) on the authority of Sahl b. al-Marzubān b. Muḥammad al-Tamīmī on the 
authority of ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Zubayr al-Ḥumaydī on the authority of Ibn ʿUyayna on 
the authority of Manṣūr on the authority of al-Zuhrī on the authority of ʿUrwa on the 

145.  Cf. al-Ṭabarānī, al-Muʿjam al-kabīr, 8:190–91. 
146.  Cf. al-ʿUqaylī, Kitāb al-Ḍuʿafāʾ, 3:916, no. 1171: ʿUmar b. Abī Ṣāliḥ al-ʿAtakī.
147.  The text says منكــرات  , but it is probably نكــرات .
148.  Cf. al-ʿUqaylī, Kitāb al-Ḍuʿafāʾ, 3:916, no. 1171: ʿUmar b. Abī Ṣāliḥ al-ʿAtakī. 



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authority of ʿĀʾisha, may God be pleased with her, that she said: ‘The Messenger of 
God, may God honor him and grant him peace, said: “The first thing that God created 
was the Intellect.”’149 And he [Abū Nuʿaym] mentioned this ḥadīth in this way in his 
biographical entry on Sufyān b. ʿUyayna [d. 198/814]. I did not find in his isnād anyone 
who might be described as weak; nevertheless, there is no doubt that this [ḥadīth] is 
attached to this isnād, and I do not know who did it. The ḥadīth is to be rejected. 

Z: I say that the exact wording of ʿĀiʾsha’s ḥadīth, according to what is written in the 
Ḥilya, is that ʿĀʾisha said: “The Messenger of God, may God honor him and grant him 
peace, narrated to me: ‘The first thing that God created was the Intellect. He told it: “Come 
forward!” And it came forward. Then He told it: “Go back!” And it went back. Then He said: 
“I have not created a creature better than you are. Through you I take and though you I 
give.”’” Abū Nuʿaym said that this is a gharīb [i.e., a ḥadīth conveyed by only one narrator] 
among the ḥadīths of Sufyān, Manṣūr, and al-Zuhrī.150 I do not know of any narrator on 
the authority of al-Ḥumaydī other than Sahl, and [so] I consider him [Sahl] mistaken in  
it[s narration] (wāhiyan). 

And then al-ʿIrāqī said:

As for Abū Hurayra’s ḥadīth, al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī narrated it in the 206th chapter (aṣl),151 
where he said: “Al-Faḍl b. Muḥammad narrated to us that Hishām b. Khālid al-Dimashqī 
narrated to him that Yaḥyā”—by whom he meant, in my view, Yaḥyā al-Ghassānī—
“narrated to him that Abū ʿAbd Allāh, the client (mawlā) of the Banū Umayya, narrated 
to him on the authority of Abū Ṣāliḥ on the authority on Abū Hurayra, may God be 
pleased with him, that he said: ‘I heard the Messenger of God say: “The first thing that 
God created was the pen; then He created the nūn,”152 which is the inkwell, and so on. 
And it goes on: “And then God created the Intellect and said: ‘By My Might, I will perfect 
you only in those I love, and I will make you deficient in those I made deficient.’”’ As 
for Abū ʿAbd Allāh, I do not know who that is.”

Z: I say that Ibn ʿAsākir [d. 571/1176] recorded (akhraja) in his Tārīkh [madīnat Dimashq] 
the following: “Abū al-ʿIzz Aḥmad b. ʿAbd Allāh informed us that Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. 
Ḥasanūn informed him that Abū Ḥusayn al-Dāraquṭnī informed him that the qāḍī Abū Ṭāhir 
Muḥammad b. Aḥmad b. Naṣr narrated to him that Jaʿfar b. Muḥammad al-Faryānī narrated 

149.  Cf. Abū Nuʿaym, Ḥilyat al-awliyāʾ, 7:318.
150.  Cf. Abū Nuʿaym, Ḥilyat al-awliyāʾ, 7:318.
151.  In the edition I used, the ḥadīth is found in the 208th chapter. See al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, al-Nuskha 

al-musnada, 1:765. However, in the available abridged version (which omits the isnāds) it indeed appears in the 
206th chapter. See al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, Nawādir al-uṣūl fī maʿrifat aḥādīth al-Rasūl, ed. ʿA. ʿUmayra (Beirut: 
Dār al-Jīl, 1992), 2:254.

152.  Al-Zabīdī’s version contains “light” (nūr) instead of the word nūn (the name of the letter ن ). However, 
I chose to use nūn, because nūr is likely to be the result of an oversight by the editor. Other versions of the 
ḥadīth in this edition mention nūn along with “pen,” likely alluding to the Qurʾānic verse 68:1. Furthermore, 
it is the meaning of nūn, not of nūr, that is discussed later in the text. Finally, another edition of selections of 
commentaries on Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn mentions nūn here. See al-ʿIrāqī, Takhrīj aḥādīth Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, 233. 



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to him that Abū Marwān Hishām b. Khālid al-Azraq narrated to him that al-Ḥusayn b. Yaḥyā 
al-Khushanī narrated to him on the authority of Abū ʿAbd Allāh, the client (mawlā) of the 
Banū Umayya, on the authority of Abū Ṣāliḥ on the authority of Abū Hurayra that he said: 
‘I heard the Messenger of God, may God honor him and grant him peace, say that the first 
thing that God created was the pen; then He created the nūn, which is the inkwell, and 
then He told it: “Write!” And it replied: “And what should I write?” He said: “Write what is 
and what will come to pass of actions or effects or allotments (rizq) and appointed times 
(ajal).” So it wrote what is and what will be until the Day of Judgment.’” And this is [what 
God meant in the Qurʾān by] saying: “Nūn. By the pen and by the [record] that [men] write” 
(Q 68:1). [The report continued:] “Then he sealed the pen and it [the pen] did not speak. It 
will not speak until the Day of Judgment. Then He [God] created the Intellect and said: ‘By 
My Might, I will perfect you in those I love and I will make you deficient in those I hate.’” 
And this is a good corroboration (mutābaʿa) of what the shaykh of al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī had 
narrated (the shaykh of al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī is al-Faḍl b. Muḥammad), even though the 
shaykhs of Hishām differ in the two narrations, as you can see. 

I say that Abū ʿAbd Allāh is the client of the Banū Umayya; his name is Nāṣiḥ, and he was 
mentioned by Ibn ʿAsākir. And Sumayy also narrated it on the authority of Abū Ṣāliḥ. Ibn 
ʿAdī153 [al-Jurjānī, d. 365/976] said: 

ʿĪsā b. Aḥmad, the Ṣūfī, narrated to us in Egypt, and al-Rabīʿ b. Sulaymān al-Jīzī narrated 
to him that Muḥammad b. Wahb al-Dimashqī narrated to him that al-Walīd b. Muslim 
narrated to him that Mālik b. Anas [d. 179/795] narrated to him on the authority of 
Sumayy, and he quoted it [the ḥadīth], except that it contains: “actions or appointed 
times (ajal) or effects, and the pen pinned down (jarā) what will come to pass until the 
Day of Judgment.” And it also contains: “And the Omnipotent said: ‘I have not created 
a creature more wonderful to me than you are,’ and so on.”

Ibn ʿAdī said:154 “It [this ḥadīth] is false (bāṭil) and to be rejected (munkar), and its ruin 
(āfa) is Muḥammad b. Wahb. He has more than one rejected ḥadīth.”

And [al-Dhahabī] said in al-Mīzān: “Ibn ʿAdī said the truth that this ḥadīth is false.”155 
Al-Dāraquṭnī recorded (akhraja) it in al-Gharāʾib156 on the authority of ʿAlī b. Aḥmad 
al-Azraq on the authority of Aḥmad b. Jaʿfar b. Aḥmad al-Fahrī on the authority of al-Rabīʿ 
b. Sulaymān al-Jīzī with this isnād [that continues with al-Dimashqī].

And he [al-Dāraquṭnī] said: This ḥadīth is not well-known either from Mālik or from 
Sumayy.” And al-Walīd b. Muslim is reliable, and Muḥammad b. Wahb and the [transmitter] 
after him are unobjectionable (laysa bihim baʾs). And I am afraid that they may have mixed 

153.  Ibn ʿAdī al-Jurjānī, al-Kāmil fī ḍuʿafāʾ al-rijāl, ed. M. b. M. al-Sarsāwī (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Rushd, 2013), 
9:379–80. 

154.  Ibn ʿAdī, al-Kāmil, 9:380. 
155.  Al-Dhahabī, al-Mīzān, 4:61. 
156.  This book has been lost. 



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up the  ḥadīth. Ibn ʿAdī157 and al-Bayhaqī158 recorded through the narration of Ḥafṣ b. ʿUmar 
that  al-Faḍl b. Qays al-Raqāshī159 narrated to him on the authority of Abū Uthmān al-Nahdī 
on the authority of Abū Hurayra, who raised it to the Prophet (rafaʿahu),160 and he quoted it 
in the same way as Abū Umāma’s ḥadīth, mentioned above. As for al-Faḍl, Yaḥyā said about 
him: “He is a bad man.” As for Ḥafs b. ʿUmar, he was the qāḍī of Aleppo and Ibn Ḥabbān said 
about him: “He narrates forged ḥadīths on the authority of reliable transmitters, and it is 
not permitted to use his ḥadīths as legal proofs (Lā yaḥillu al-iḥtijāj bihi).” Al-Dāraquṭnī161 
recorded it from the narration of Ḥasan b. ʿArafa, [who said:] “Sayf b. Muḥammad narrated 
to us on the authority of Sufyān al-Thawrī on the authority of al-Fuḍayl b. ʿUthmān on the 
authority of Abū Hurayra,” and so on, as mentioned earlier. It was agreed that Sayf was a 
liar (Sayf kadhdhāb bi-l-ijmāʿ).

Al-ʿIrāqī said: 

The ḥadīth of al-Ḥasan [al-Baṣrī] on the authority of a number of transmitters (ʿan ʿ idda) 
was also narrated by al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī,162 who said: ʿ Abd al-Raḥīm b. Ḥabīb narrated 
to us that Dāwūd b. al-Muḥabbir narrated to him that al-Ḥasan b. Dīnār said: I heard 
al-Ḥasan say: “I heard from a number of Companions of the Messenger of God, may 
God honor him and grant him peace, that the Messenger of God, may God honor him 
and grant him peace, said: ‘When (lammā) God created the Intellect,’ and so on, and he 
added to it (zāda fīhi): ‘Then He [God] told it: “Sit down!” And it sat down. Then He told 
it: “Depart!” (inṭaliq) And it departed. Then He told it: “Be quiet!” And it was quiet. Then 
He said: “By My Might and by My Glory and by My Greatness and by My Magnificence 
and by My Power and by My Omnipotence, I have not created a creature dearer to Me 
than you are or nobler to Me (akram) than you are. Through you I am known, through 
you I am praised, through you I am obeyed, through you I take, through you I give, it is 
you that I blame, and it is you that I reward, and to you belongs punishment.”’” All of 
its [this ḥadīth’s] narrators except for al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī are to be damned (halkā). ʿAbd 
al-Raḥīm b. Ḥabīb al-Faryābī is worthless, as Yaḥyā b. Maʿīn said. Ibn Ḥibbān said that 
he may have forged more than five hundred ḥadīths. Dāwūd was already mentioned. 
Al-Ḥasan b. Dīnār is also weak. And Dāwūd b. al-Muḥabbir narrated it also in [Kitāb] 
al-ʿAql with an interrupted isnād (mursalan), saying, “Ṣāliḥ al-Murrī narrated to us on 
the authority of al-Ḥasan b. Abī Ḥusayn,” and then he gave a shortened version. So, as 
a whole, all of its [this ḥadīth’s] pathways are weak. 

157.  Ibn ʿAdī, al-Kāmil, 4:82. 
158.  Al-Bayhaqī, al-Jāmiʿ li-shuʿab al-īmān, ed. M. A. al-Nadawī (Riyadh: Maktabat al-Rushd, 2003), 6:349.
159.  He is discussed earlier under the name al-Faḍl b. ʿĪsā al-Raqāshī; Qays is probably a scribal error. 
160.  This means that he directly attributed the ḥadīth to the Prophet, omitting some narrators in the isnād
161.  Cf. Al-Suyūṭī, al-Laʾālī al-maṣnūʿa fī al-aḥādīth al-mawḍūʿa (Beirut: Dār al-Maʿrifa, n.d.), 1:129; Ibn 

al-Jawzī, Kitāb al-Mawḍūʿāt, ed. ʿA. M. ʿUthmān (Medina: al-Maktaba al-Salafiyya, 1966–68), 1:174. 
162.  Al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, al-Nuskha al-musnada, 764. 



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Z: I say that al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī163 said that al-Faḍl b. Muḥammad narrated to him that 
Hishām b. Khālid narrated to him on the authority of Baqiyya [b. Makhlad] on the authority 
of al-Awzāʿī the same ḥadīth from the Messenger of God, may God honor him and grant 
him peace. As for what he [al-ʿIrāqī] said—that Dāwūd b. al-Muḥabbir narrated it in [Kitāb] 
al-ʿAql with an interrupted isnād (mursalan), and so on—al-Bayhaqī recorded it (akhrajahu), 
and after quoting the ḥadīth from the narration of the previously mentioned Ḥafṣ b. ʿUmar, 
he said: “The isnād is not strong (ghayr qawī).” And it is famous from the statement of 
Ḥasan: “Abū Ṭāhir Muḥammad b. Maḥmish narrated to us that Abū Ṭāhir al-Muḥammad 
Ibādī narrated to him that al-Faḍl b. Muḥammad b. al-Musayyab narrated to him that 
ʿAbd Allāh b. Muḥammad al-ʿĀbisī narrated to him that Ṣāliḥ al-Murrī narrated to him on 
the authority of al-Ḥasan that he said: ‘When Almighty God created the Intellect,’ and he  
quoted it.” 

ʿAbd Allāh b. Aḥmad, in Zawāʾid al-Zuhd, said: 

ʿAlī b. Muslim narrated to us that Sayyār narrated to him that Jaʿfar narrated to him 
that Mālik b. Dīnār narrated to him on the authority of al-Ḥasan, who raised it to the 
Prophet (yarfaʿuhu): “When God created the Intellect, He told it: ‘Come forward!’ And 
it came.Then he told it: ‘Go back!’ And it went back. Then He told it: ‘I have not created 
a creature better than you. Through you I take and through you I give.’” 

This is, as you see, a good chain [of transmitters], so al-Ḥāfiẓ al-ʿIrāqī’s statement that 
“as a whole, all of the ḥadīth’s pathways are weak” deserves further investigation. And [the 
same applies to] what Ibn al-Jawzī said in al-Mawḍūʿāt, which was followed by Ibn Taymiyya 
as well as al-Zarkashī and others. What can be said about it at most is that it is weak in some 
of its pathways.164 Indeed, the ḥadīth was also narrated on the authority of ʿAlī, may God be 
pleased with him. Al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Suyūṭī said in his al-Laʾāliʾ al-maṣnūʿa that al-Khaṭīb said:165 

ʿAlī b. Aḥmad al-Razzāz informed us (akhbaranā) that al-Faraj ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn al-Kātib 
informed him that the qāḍī Abū Jaʿfar Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. Naṣr narrated to him 
that Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Raqqī narrated to him that Mūsā b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥasan 
b. Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib narrated to him from Fāṭima bt. Saʿīd b. ʿUqba b. Shaddād b. 
Umayya al-Juhanī on the authority of her father on the authority of Zayd b. ʿAlī on the 
authority of his father and his grandfather on the authority of ʿAlī on the authority of 
the Prophet, may God honor him and grant him peace, that he said: “The first thing that 
God created was the pen; then He created an inkwell, and he continued [the ḥadīth].  
In it, He created the Intellect. Then He interrogated it and it answered Him. Then He 
told it: ‘Go back (idhab)!’ And it went back. Then He told it: ‘Come forward!’ And it came 
forward. Then He interrogated it and it answered Him. He [God] said: ‘By My Might and 
by My Glory, I have not created anything dearer to Me than you are or and better than 
you are,’” until the end of what he mentioned.

163.  Al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī, al-Nuskha al-musnada, 764.
164.  This is an important point: al-Zabīdī makes an effort to salvage the ḥadīth. 
165.  Cf. al-Suyūṭī, al-Laʾāliʾ al-maṣnūʿa, 1:128–32. 



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G: And if you say: “Assuming that the Intellect was an accident, how was it created before 
bodies (ajsām)?”

Z: Because accidents cannot exist on their own. 
G: “And assuming that it was a substance, how would it exist on its own without occupying 

space (lā yataḥayyazu)?” Then know that this belongs to
Z: the realm of
G: esoteric knowledge (ʿilm al-mukāshafa) [i.e., Ṣūfism], and it should not be mentioned
Z: and another copy (nuskha) has “It is not appropriate that it be mentioned”
G: in the context of exoteric knowledge (ilm al-muʿāmala), and our objective
Z: here and now
G: is exoteric knowledge. 
Z: Al-Rāghib [al-Iṣfahānī, early fifth/eleventh century] conveyed this study in his 

Dharīʿa166 in a shortened version. He said: 

The Intellect is the first substance (awwalu jawhar) that the Almighty God created 
(awjadahu) and honored. This is proven by the ḥadīth whose isnād was raised to the 
Prophet (marfūʿ): ‘The first thing (awwalu mā) that God created was the Intellect,’ and 
so on. And were it an accident, as a group of people have imagined, it would not be 
correct to say that it is the first creation. For it is not possible for any accident to exist 
before the existence of a substance that could carry it. 

Z: And the examination of this point [has shown] that the substance is quiddity 
(māhiyya), such that when it exists in the sensible world (aʿyān) it would not exist in a 
substrate (mawḍūʿ). It is confined to five [types]: matter (hayūlā), form (ṣūra), body (jism), 
soul (nafs), and intellect (ʿaql).167 Because it [i.e., the substance] is either abstract (mujarrad) 
or not. As for the first [kind, the abstract], it is either not connected to the body (badan) 
by way of governance or control, or it is so connected. The former is the Intellect and the 
latter the Soul. As for the non-abstract, it is either composite or noncompound (basīṭ). The 
former is the body and the latter is either something that inheres in a substratum (ḥāl) or 
a substratum (maḥall). The former is the form and the latter the matter, and it is called the 
reality (ḥaqīqa). The substance is divided into spiritual noncompounds, such as abstract 
intellects and souls, and bodily noncompounds, such as the elements, and into those 
that are composite in the intellect and not in the external world, such as the composite 
substantial essences of genus and differentiae, and those that are composite, such as the 
three generated classes (muwalladāt thalātha) [i.e., minerals, plants, and animals]. 

166.  Al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī, al-Dharīʿa ilā makārim al-sharīʿa, ed. A. Y. A. Z. al-ʿAjamī (Cairo: Dār al-Salām, 
2007), 1:133. 

167.  This division follows the tradition of scholastic Avicennian philosophy. 



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