the reports transmitted by narrators who had been censured or judged weak. The erudite imam, distinguished scholar, and ḥāfiẓ, Zayn al-Dīn Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-ʿAẓīm al-Mundhirī—may Allah have mercy on him—excelled in abridging and refining the work, assigning every hadith to its proper source, clarifying its hidden defects, and bringing it within easy reach. He performed so admirably that he left scarcely any room for further excellence, forging ahead so far that those who came after him could only follow his lead. I therefore adopted his book as one of my finest provisions and stored it away as treasure for the Day of Return. I then polished it in the same manner with which he had polished the original: I added discussion of defects about which he had remained silent or had not completed; I undertook the authentication of hadiths he had not declared sound; I commented on problematic texts whose locks he had left unopened; I inserted additional suitable hadiths in each chapter that he had not mentioned; and I expanded the treatment of significant points that the diligent researcher might well find in no other book.”

Sunan Abū Dāwūd is given precedence over the other sunan collections, and its constituent books number thirty-five—