Kitāb al-Muʾmin
Al-Ḥusayn b. Saʿīd al-Ahwāzī, writing in the third/ninth century as a companion of three Imams, on the believer: their standing before God, the trials they are said to meet, and — the greater part of the book — the rights believers hold over one another. Visiting the sick, meeting a need before being asked, keeping a secret, withholding a harm: concrete, mutual, and stated as obligations rather than virtues, with several reports making the treatment of a believer a direct measure of one's standing with God. Like his Kitāb al-Zuhd it is early and thematic, and passages recur in al-Kāfi in a form close to this one.
Chapters
- 1. The Severity of a Believer’s Afflictions 50 hadith
- 2. The Exclusive Honors that Allah has Reserved for the Believers 33 hadith
- 3. The bond that Allah has set amongst the believers 9 hadith
- 4. The Rights of a Believer on a Fellow Believer. 14 hadith
- 5. The Reward of Helping a Believer, Relieving Him of Distress And Showing Him Kindness 39 hadith
- 6. Visiting a Believer Socially and When He is Ill 13 hadith
- 7. The Reward of one who Feeds a Believer, Quenches his Thirst, Clothes him or Pays off his Debt 12 hadith
- 8. What Allah (azwj) has Forbidden a Believer to do Against a Fellow Believer 31 hadith
About this collection
Kitāb al-Muʾmin
A second short work by al-Ḥusayn b. Saʿīd al-Ahwāzī, the third/ninth-century companion of three Imams whose Kitāb al-Zuhd stands beside it in this collection. Its subject is the believer: his standing before God, the trials said to accompany faith, and — the greater part of the book — the rights believers hold over one another. It runs in this edition to 201 narrations across 8 chapters.
What is striking is how concrete those rights are. Visiting the sick, meeting a need before it is asked for, keeping a secret, withholding a harm, greeting, feeding, speaking for someone absent: they are stated as obligations rather than as virtues, and several reports make a person’s treatment of a fellow believer a direct measure of his standing with God. The emphasis is mutual and horizontal in a way that sets the book apart from the devotional literature it is usually shelved with.
Like the Kitāb al-Zuhd it is early, thematic and unglossed, and belongs to the layer of written sources the later compilers drew on; a number of its reports recur in al-Kāfi in a closely related form.