A Document-Based Critique of Hadiths about Burning of Human Beings in Imam Ali (PBUH)’s Conduct

Based on some hadith and historical texts, in a few cases of meting out jurisprudentially fixed punishments (ḥudūd) to exaggerators in veneration of the Muslim Prophet and his family (ghulāt), apostates, and infidels, Imam Ali (PBUH) ordered that some criminal individuals be burned, and at times he personally exerted the punishment. Shiite and Sunni sources have disagreements over some details and themes of, and facts related to the hadiths. Hadiths about burning of human beings in Imam Ali (PBUH)’s conduct include both immolation and cremation, but being choked to death by smoke from the fire should also be considered due to confusions in the texts of the hadiths. In the present study, an attempt has been made to extract all the relevant hadiths from the historical and hadith sources, and to examine and analyze their documentation. To this aim, all those hadiths with their different chain of narrators will be quoted and then critiqued