al-Hurr al-Amili

Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Hurr al-Amili (1033-1104 AH / 1624-1693 CE) was a Twelver (Imami) Shia scholar of hadith — the reports transmitted from the Prophet Muhammad and the Shia Imams. He was born in Mashghara, a village in the Jabal Amil region of present-day southern Lebanon, a long-established centre of Shia learning, where he received his early training before performing the pilgrimage (hajj) and visiting the Shia shrine cities of Iraq.

Like many Jabal Amil scholars of his era, he migrated to Safavid Iran, where the state recruited Shia jurists. Sources report he stopped in Isfahan, then the Safavid capital, where he met the influential scholar Muhammad Baqir al-Majlisi, before settling in Mashhad. There he served as Shaykh al-Islam — a senior religious-judicial office — at the shrine of the eighth Imam, Ali al-Rida, and remained until his death; he is buried within the shrine precinct.

His enduring work is Wasa'il al-Shia, a large, systematically arranged compilation of legal hadith drawn from the earlier Imami "Four Books" and other sources, composed over roughly two decades and completed in 1082/1671. It remains a standard reference for Twelver jurists. Scholars debate how firmly he should be classed within the Akhbari school (which emphasised hadith over independent legal reasoning); he is often described as a relatively moderate proponent, and the characterisation is contested rather than settled.