UC Berkeley

This dissertation consists of an inquiry into Shiʿi hadith, focusing on Muḥsin Fayḍ Kāshānī (1599–1680) as its central figure, Safavid Iran (1501–1722) as its period of interest, and hadith canonisation as its main theme. Fayḍ was a seventeenth-century polymath and the compiler of an influential hadith compendium entitled al-Wāfī. Completed in 1658, al-Wāfī is unique in that it was the first major Shiʿi hadith compendium to have appeared since the Istibṣār of al-Ṭūsī (d. 1067), compiled six centuries earlier. Al-Wāfī is also the first work to provide a comprehensive commentary on the Imāmī hadith corpus collectively referred to as the Four Books (al-kutub al-arbaʿa), namely al-Kulaynī’s al-Kāfī, Ibn Bābūya’s Man lā yaḥḍuruhu ’l-faqīh, and al-Ṭūsī’s Tahdhīb al-aḥkām and al-Istibṣār. While in recent years various aspects of Fayḍ’s thought have been briefly explored, his writings on hadith remain largely neglected. This dissertation attempts to present a detailed study of Fayḍ’s approach to hadith as a compiler, exegete, theologian, and jurist. It examines al-Wāfī’s structure and content, sources and influences, and the principles that direct Fayḍ’s hadith authentication, compilation, and interpretation. In pursuing this line of enquiry, this dissertation contextualises al-Wāfī within Fayḍ’s extensive writing oeuvre as well as the wider Safavid hadith discourse. This includes a study of the emergence of the Four Books as the locus of discussions regarding the authenticity of Shiʿi hadith corpus during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In addition to examining al-Wāfī’s relation to the historical development of arguments related to the authority of the Four Books amongst Safavid scholars, this dissertation addresses the issue of the canonicity of Shiʿi hadith as discussed in Fayḍ’s writings. Based on its examination of Fayḍ’s attempts at providing a definitive hadith compendium, this study concludes that certain elements within his thought – such as privileging a report’s content (matn) over its documentary evidence (sanad) as the most reliable means of hadith authentication – problematize the claims of canonicity for any particular corpus of hadith including his own.

In investigating how the discipline of hadith was envisioned by one of its leading practitioners, this study also opens a window onto the vast panorama of theological views, exegetical principles, and theories of hadith authenticity that have continued to shape Shiʿi thought to the present. This dissertation represents a necessary step towards a larger project of writing a reception history of the Four Books from the eleventh century to the present and investigating the factors that have contributed to their consolidation as the most authoritative sources of Shiʿi hadith.