the opening of his Maʿālim al-Sunan: “In this work Abū Dāwūd has gathered from the hadiths that constitute the foundations of knowledge, the principal sunnahs, and the rulings of jurisprudence, something to which we know of no predecessor who beat him and no successor who has matched him.”

Al-Ḥāfiẓ al-Mundhirī produced an abridgment of Sunan Abū Dāwūd, and Imam Ibn al-Qayyim wrote annotations to that abridgment. Ibn al-Qayyim—may Allah have mercy upon him—described Sunan Abū Dāwūd, al-Mundhirī’s abridgment, and the notes he himself appended, saying:

“When the Sunan compiled by Abū Dāwūd, Sulaymān ibn al-Ashʿath al-Sijistānī—may Allah have mercy on him—took, within Islam, the station that Allah allotted it, so that it became an arbiter among the Muslims and the decisive criterion at points of dispute and contention—such that the fair-minded refer their cases to it and the researchers accept its judgment—for he gathered together the corpus of hadiths on legal rulings, arranged them in the finest fashion, organised them in the best order, selecting them with the most careful selection and discarding from them…"