Eighth Principle: The symbols that al-Suyūṭī employs in al-Jāmiʿ al-Ṣaghīr are not reliable.

It has become common practice among many scholars to rely on al-Suyūṭī’s shorthand marks that classify a hadith as sound, fair, or weak, and Shaykh al-Sayyid Sābiq followed them in this. In our judgment such reliance is unwarranted for two reasons:

1. The copyists have frequently altered those symbols. Time and again I have seen a hadith bearing one mark in the printed text, yet its commentator al-Manāwī quotes al-Suyūṭī himself as having assigned it a different mark. Al-Manāwī was, as he states at the beginning of his commentary, quoting from al-Jāmiʿ in the author’s own handwriting, and he himself says there: