Ibn Qulawayh al-Qummi

Abu al-Qasim Ja'far ibn Muhammad ibn Qulawayh al-Qummi was a Twelver Shia traditionist (a collector and transmitter of hadith, reported sayings and deeds of the Prophet and the Imams) active in the tenth century CE. He belonged to a Qom family already known for hadith scholarship: he is reported to have studied first under his father, Muhammad, and his brother, Ali, both remembered as traditionists. Qom, in present-day Iran, was then a leading center of Shia learning.

Tradition holds that he later traveled in search of hadith, and his death in Iraq is well attested; some accounts also report travel to Egypt, though this is less certain. He is best known for Kamil al-Ziyarat ("The Complete [Book] of Visitations"), a collection of roughly 843 reports on ziyara — the practice of visiting and venerating the graves of the Prophet and the Imams. Within Twelver Shia tradition the book is highly esteemed.

Twelver biographers such as al-Najashi and al-Tusi grade him thiqa ("reliable") as a transmitter. He is widely described as a teacher of al-Shaykh al-Mufid, a foundational Twelver theologian, in jurisprudence. Some modern Shia sources also count the great traditionist al-Kulayni (compiler of al-Kafi) among his teachers; given al-Kulayni's death around 329 AH this direct link is debated and is best treated as a claim of the tradition rather than settled fact. He is reported to have died in Baghdad and to have been buried at the al-Kazimiyya shrine.