—for his mature students—would take place in this library, with its rich collection of reference works. He—may Allah Most High have mercy on him—therefore instructed Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abd al-Azīz al-Mutawwa and Sheikh Ali ibn Hamad al-Sālihī to teach these younger students in the library whenever the Sheikh was not teaching his own students. If the two classes happened to coincide, the younger students would be taught in one corner of the congregational mosque.

These younger students studied tawhīd, hadith, jurisprudence, and grammar. For tawhīd, they studied The Three Fundamental Principles and similar works; for hadith, The Forty Hadith of al-Nawawī; and for grammar, al-Ājurrūmiyyah. As for jurisprudence, two considerations prevented the abridged manuals of the Hanbali school from being taught to these beginners:

First, they confined themselves to the well-known position in the school of Imam Ahmad, even though some issues within that position are outweighed by other, stronger positions transmitted within the school.

Second, the complexity of their wording and the difficulty of grasping their meaning prevented beginning students from understanding and absorbing them.

Our Sheikh—may Allah have mercy on him—therefore composed this beneficial abridgment, selecting one position within the school for each issue, whether it accorded with the school’s well-known position or with another position—whichever was distinguished from competing opinions by sound evidence and cogent reasoning. None of these selections, however, departs from a position held by one of the other three Imams’ schools.