Sulaym ibn Qays al-Hilālī al-ʿĀmirī (Arabic: سليم بن قيس الهلالي العامري, died before 714, was one of the Tabi‘un and a companion of Ali towards the end of the latter's life.
[4] Other scholars, such as Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, have been more cautious in rejecting Sulaym ibn Qays' historicity, but do agree that the attribution of the extant Shi'i hadith collection to him is false.
[3] The Twelver scholars Ahmad ibn Ubayda (d. 941) and Abu Abd Allah al-Ghadhanfari (d. 1020) based their denial of the existence of Sulaym's book on three factors: a segment in the book indicates there were thirteen imams instead of the traditionally held twelve; another segment states Muhammad ibn Abu Bakr condemned his dying father Abu Bakr despite Muhammad being a three-year-old child; and the book was allegedly solely transmitted to Aban ibn Abi Ayyash, despite the fact that the latter was only fourteen-years-old.
[2] When Sulaym was inspired about his death, he told Aban, O the son of my brother, I am about to leave this world, as Prophet has informed me so.
[6] Aban had made a solemn oath not to talk of any of the writings during Sulaym's lifetime and that after his death he would give the book only to trustworthy Shi'a of Ali.
[1] Kitab Sulaym belongs to earliest known hadith collections, having been composed in the second century after the death of Muhammad.
The modern scholar Hossein Modarressi dates the original core of this work to the final years of Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik's reign (r. 724–743), which would make it one of the oldest Islamic books that are still extant.
[1] It documents that Muhammad had promised his followers about a man from the lineage of Imam Husain who would purify Islam by removing innovations, i.e. the distortion of Quranic interpretation and prophetic traditions (hadiths).
[1] The work is also one of the first to document the political divide amongst Muslims after the death of Muhammad,[2] and how certain figures in Islam allegedly distorted prophetic traditions in order to gain power.