because of its numerous chains of transmission. See Addendum 2 at the end of the volume in the new edition.
I had initially resolved to quote all of those reports, one by one, furnish each with precise academic documentation, analyze their isnāds, and separate what is authentic from what is not in accordance with the principles of this noble science, citing the very wordings that bear on our discussion. It then became clear to me that such a treatment would make the work exceedingly long and would enlarge the booklet beyond the size I had intended. I therefore restricted myself to six of those hadiths whose authenticity is established by the aforementioned criteria—most are inherently sound, and some come through more than one route. Whoever wishes to consult the remaining reports will find them in Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah’s valuable work Ighāthat al-Lahfān min Maṣāyid al-Shayṭān, vol. 1, on the following pages: 239, 248, 251, 254, 256, and 261–265⦗1⦘.
(1) While I was on the point of finishing the fair copy of this treatise, one of the brothers handed me a book entitled Ahadith Dhamm al-Ghinaʾ wa-l-Maʿazif fi l-Mizan by our brother ʿAbd Allah b. Yusuf al-Judayʿ. I found it an excellent work that brings together all the hadiths and athar (companion-reports) on the subject—something, to my knowledge, unprecedented—and subjects each of them to a rigorous hadith analysis rarely encountered even in the classical takhrij collections, all while adhering to the rules of this noble science. As evidence of what I have said, the total material amounts to roughly one hundred items: 8 sound hadiths, 70 weak hadiths (most of them very weak), and 18 mawquf reports, some of which are authentic. Thus the honorable author has already accomplished what I had planned—namely, to examine all the relevant texts—and even gone beyond that; may Allah reward him. I only wish he had been more precise in grading the weak narrations and had arranged the hadiths that suggest permissibility alongside those that suggest prohibition, to help readers distinguish between them, especially since he did not treat the matter from a juristic perspective nor clarify the evidentiary weight of certain texts—such as the reports of ʿAʾisha and Ibn ʿUmar on which Ibn Hazm relied to argue for permissibility. A fuller answer to those reports will follow, God willing, on pp. 106, 115–116, and 119.