Comparison of the Contents of the Book of Basa'r-al-Darajat with Authentic Sources of Shi'i Narrative

The influence of exaggerated words in the hadiths of the Imams (AS), especially during the time of the “short absenteeism”, has created many problems in the religious believes of people in the next centuries. The Book of Basa'r-al-Darajat by Mohammad ibn al-Hassan al-Saffar, who died in the year 290, is one of the works that seems to have contained a limited number of hadiths with exaggerated concepts and has given an super natural personality to the Imams (AS), while the same accounts of the Imams (AS), which are mentioned in a large number of Imams' credible sources, do not endorse such a view. Therefore, the question arises as to whether this attitude can be attributed to the intellectual principles of Shi’ite Imamyyeh (Twelver Shi’ite). Investigating and extracting information about the author, his time, his intellectual environment, and his narrators, along with a comparison of the content of his work with other authoritative Shi’ite scholars in this period, can clarify the dimensions of this issue. In order to investigate the possibility of exaggeration in parts of this book, meanwhile we study why the narrations of this book have not been quoted in the book by some authoritative narrators such as Muhammad ibn Hassan ibn Waleed, A certain number of dubious hadiths were chosen and overwhelmed with the works of other Shi’ite elders, in particular, and specifically in Kotob e Arbiah .The result shows that among the statistical society of the chosen hadiths of this research, which most of all have exaggerated content, only two cases are in Osole Kafi and one case has a similar narrative in Sheikh Sadough's book, and the rest has not been narrated in none of the authentic Shi'a's narriative books. This shows disproportion of content of these hadiths with Imamiyyi's intellectual foundations.