Al-Hākim al-Naysābūrī and Allegation of Shiism Against Him

Hadith scholars conduct investigations in various ways about hadith narrators as well as those who have authored a work in the field. In so doing, they try to develop an approach by examining what has been said about them. However, sometimes they fail to find out the truth of the information their research yields about the narrators. And yet scholars, by passing on the information to next generations, contribute to the formation of an ill-founded judgment in people’s mind about the narrators. Al-Hākim al-Naysābūrī, who has an important place in the history of hadith due to his works, has been subjected to such a situation where he was alleged to be a Shiite. Allegations of this sort were mentioned in biographical works on him. Because of these, suspicions were aroused with regard to his hadith scholarship, and thus whether or not he should be trusted in his transmissions about certain topics was called into question. This article offers an analysis of such allegations by examining historical information about al-Hākim and concludes that those allegations do not have solid foundations.