4 – Sunan al-Nasāʾī
Imam al-Nasāʾī—may Allah have mercy on him—authored two works that he classified as Sunan: the larger al-Sunan al-Kubrā and a shorter version he condensed from it. The latter is known as al-Mujtabā, meaning “the selections taken from the Kubrā.” It is this abridged collection that received particular attention from scholars and came to be counted among the six canonical books of hadith. The book enjoys high standing, contains a vast number of chapters, and its headings reveal the author’s fiqh acumen; in fact, some of them clearly display Imam al-Nasāʾī’s precision in legal deduction. One illustration of this appears near the beginning of the Book of Purification, where he titles a chapter: “A concession regarding