Reviewing Narrations about Overweightness of Imam Ali (As)

According to some narratives from both divisions of Islam, imam ali (a.s) was “Asla’a” and “Bateen” which means that he was overweight. In some parts of these narratives in forms of ziyarat, he was addressed as: “praise be upon you, O, the hairless and overweight.” These narratives haven’t been mentioned in the important sources of Shia such as the four books. But in the sources after five and sixth century, this trait has been mentioned between his other qualities. And after a while the extent of this trait got larger in Shia books that are about greatness, miracles and prayers of infallibles. But it was pointed out that this trait cannot be a virtue itself so for the sake of changing the meaning of the word, justifying and interpreting it, some looked to a few narrated quotes which can be criticized. In fact, the problem with these narrators is that they are eager to agree at any cost with every hadiths that are about the virtues of imams. However substance of that hadith is irrational or has a problem in it’s source or it’s citation. Or maybe it is even in contradiction with the manner and spiritual history of that imam. It seems that narrators of hadiths with the intention that there was someone against imam who was overweight and living lordly, they made this trait for him to say that the opponent had the same trait and virtue as well. In this article, our intention at first try to review every sources of hadiths with this content with concentration on every recitative aspect of it. Then we study the source, document and context. The main problems of these narratives are disarrangement in narration, incoherence in context, unclarified issue, narrating with different forms of adjectives in hadiths, weakness of narrators, context problems, being in contradiction with certain narrations from imam himself and his lifestyle and also contradiction with reason that this article discussed them all.