Al-Kafi, Kulaini greatest contribution (Part 2)

First Kulaini collected whatever he could of the 400 books of Usool. Then he sorted them topic-wise. Remember that the students of the Imam would spend the whole day with the Imam and would write down all the queries answered by the Imam, without arranging the material topic-wise. Thus every page was a jumble of topics ranging from Greek philosophy to Indian medicine to salat to beliefs of Islam etc. However, given the circumstances even noting down the queries and their answers was a major achievement. Next, Kulaini himself traveled all over the Islamic world to collect ahadith. As soon it would come to his notice that a person in a particular village knows a Hadith, he would go to that village, even if it entailed journeying over great distances, to hear it from him personally and write it. He refused to appoint anyone else to go in his stead, so that he could be sure that the written Hadith tallied word for word with what was related by that person. This process went on for 20 years. Thus the kafi came into existence.

 He compiled the book and gave it to his students. During those times writing was not popular, because it was very difficult to get paper and ink. Thus the preferred method was oral transmission. Hence Kulaini would read out the ahadith to his students and they would memorize them. Then the students would recite the ahadith and he would hear them. When he was satisfied that a student had learnt all the ahadith, he would give the student permission to narrate them on his authority. This permission was called Ijaza e Riwayat, and was an important permission in those days. Thus his students were instrumental in spreading these ahadith, till such a time when printing became popular and books began to be printed. Bear in mind that the importance of the 4 basic books (kutub e arba’) for the shies is the same as the importance of the sihah sitta for the Ahl-ul-sunna, the difference being that while they claim every Hadith in the sihah sitta to be sahi(authentic), we make no such claims about every Hadith contained in these 4 books. It is for the Ulema to investigate and verify the status of each Hadith. Together the sahi Bukhari and the sahi Muslim contain 7000 ahadith, while the Kafi alone contains 16,199 ahadith. This, when these two compilers worked in very favorable circumstances, whereas Kulaini worked in a hostile environment, amongst the opponents of Shea Islam, the rulers were against him, and  he had no one to help him. Yet he managed to collect more ahadith than the compilers of Sahi Bukhari and Sahi Muslim put together.

 And, of course the Imam himself was well aware of the existence of this book and also knew that this was going to become a basic book of the Shias. If there was something very wrong about this book, the Imam would have pointed it out or would have forbidden the compilation. But we find that nothing of this kind happened. On the contrary, it is said that Kafi reached Imam Zaman (A.S), and he is reported to have said," This book is Kafi (enough) for our Shias.” This is one of the reasons it is called Kafi. However this incident is not proved.

Other links:

Grand Ayatollah Mar`ashi Najafi Public Library

The Compiler Of Nahjul-balagha: Syed Razi

Ayatollah Bahauddini’s Life in Detail

Ayatullah Sayyid Ali Husseini Sistani

Biography of Imam Khomeini