The Trustworthy Narrators in Kitab Al-Dhua'faa for Ibn Al- Ghadha'iry

Abstract

Praise be to Allah, the Lord of worlds, prayer and peace be upon the most honorable creature prophet Mohammed and his pure progenies…. Hagiography has an important role in the jurisprudential deduction; it is the deduction backbone; the verbal evidences mostly depend on it, where the trust worth's narration occupied the largest area. To obtain a reliable narration, it is necessary to test the narrator chain, so the narrator should be examined. For the Shi'ites, there are four principle books that deal with hagiography, they are the only basic books that are survived since the seventh century of Hegira. The lat expert jurists, starting with Ibn Tawoos and his two students Al- Hily and ibn Dawood till our current time, depend on these books. These four principle books are:- Min Ikhteyar Al- Kashi, Rijal Al- Najashi, Rijal Al-Toosy and Fahreset Al-Toosy. Another one is added to them which is Kitab Al-Dhua'faa for Ibn Al- Ghadha'iry where many scientists had suspected. As the first four books are reliable and agreed upon their documents, the researcher was interested in studying the fifth one where the author was the only one who had referred to the weak narrators, which indicates that those, who had not been mentioned by, Ibn Al- Ghadha'iry are accepted for him with his rigidity in judging the narrators. This book had been studied by many of the early and late scholars, yet extracting or deducing the trustworthy according to an objective standard that depends on two famous figure in hagiography :- Al- Najashi and Al-Toosy, in a separated research is un preceded attempt. It is a study to define the trustworthy narrators in this book basing on important role:- if Ibn Al- Ghadha'iry had an opinion, that opposites Al- Najashi and Al-Toosy,s' opinin, upon weakening a narrator, their opinion would be preferred, as the researcher deduced from the says of many hagiographic experts. According to that (15 narrators) were trustworthy among the hagiographic experts. Sometimes Al- Najashi had different opinion than that of Al-Toosy, in this case one of them would agree with Ibn Al- Ghadha'iry and the second would be differ. Here lies the research difficulty; it became necessary to compare varied evidences to prefer certain ones. The research is divided into a preface and two topics. The preface gives a definition of Kitab Al-Dhua'faa. The first topic deals with the agreed upon narrators, while the second topic deals with the disagreed upon narrators. The conclusion includes the most important results that could be summarized as following:-1- The hagiographers agreed that Kitab Al-Dhua'faa is for Ahmed Bin Al- Husain Bin Al- Ghadha'iry.2- Ibn Al- Ghadha'iry, though there is no text upon his justice, yet there are different evidences that he is of the trustworthy; he is one of the sheikhs of Al- Najashi.3- There is no way to agree with Al- Tahrany who said that the book had been put by some of the opposites because he has no accepted evidence, moreover he had put his say away in his ( Tabaqhat A`alam Al- Shi`a) in refereeing to Ibn Al- Ghadha'iry's father Ahmed Bin Al- Husain Bin Obaidellah Al- Ghadha'iry.4- Al-Sayed Ibn Tawoos( d. 673A.H) was the first who referred to this book; he had enlisted it in his Hal Al-Ishkal, yet his book had been lost as well. 5- The narrators had been accused without deep study for their conditions.6- Ibn Al- Ghadha'iry weakening of a number of the narrators opposites the opinions of the famous hagiographers such as Al- Najashi and Al-Toosy, this had been clarified in the first topic.7- He had been weakened and invalidated a great number of the narrators who are known with their reliability and pious, some of them are of the great sheikhs of Shi'ites such as ( Ibraheem bin Amr Al-Sana'ny, Isma'il Bin Mahran, hudhaifa bin Mansoor, Yahiya bin Mohammed and others) who are mentioned in the first topic.8- He had agreed with Al- Najashi and Al-Toosy in weakening some narrators, though there are many evidences that indicate their reliability as many of the hagiographers said.