1 – The first benefit (1)
- Imām al-Nawawī—may Allah have mercy on him—said at the end of the book’s introduction: “So I considered it fitting to compile an abridgement of authentic ḥadīths.”
I say: I have two observations about this statement:
First: By the term “authentic” (al-ṣaḥīḥah) he means a strong report that includes the ḥasan and everything above it, in accordance with the early usage followed by the first ḥadīth scholars, before al-Tirmidhī—following his teacher al-Bukhārī—popularised the division of accepted reports into ṣaḥīḥ (authentic) and ḥasan (good). This use is permissible and unobjectionable, and it is the convention I have adopted in many of my own writings, such as my book Ṣaḥīḥ al-Jāmiʿ al-Ṣaghīr wa Ziyādatuh (2), my treatise Ṣaḥīḥ al-Kalimi ʾl-Ṭayyib (already in print), Ṣaḥīḥ Abī Dāwūd (3), Silsilat al-Aḥādīth al-Ṣaḥīḥah, and others. Nonetheless, the division introduced by al-Tirmidhī is sounder and more precise.
Second: It is a claim of predominance, not an absolute one; for a long time I have noticed that the book contains some weak and rejected (munkar) ḥadīths, and this meticulous verification has shown me that they are more numerous than I had previously thought, as you will see in the commentary on them and in what we shall yet mention
(1) I recorded these benefits beneath every hadith to which they belong and left Shaykh Nasir’s introduction exactly as it was. (Zuhair)
(2) The collection runs to six volumes, and the companion section on weak reports occupies another six; all of them—as well as my other works—have been printed by al-Maktab al-Islami. (Nasir)
This marginal note by Shaykh Nasir applied to our first edition of the two books. Later I reorganised them: Sahih al-Jamiʿ al-Saghir wa Ziyadatih (the sound narrations of the Small Compendium and its supplement) now appears in two volumes; I produced a third volume arranging its hadiths under the headings of fiqh, entitled Tabwib wa Tartib Ahadith Sahih al-Jamiʿ al-Saghir wa Ziyadatih ʿala Abwab al-Fiqh (classification and arrangement of the hadiths in Sahih al-Jamiʿ … according to the chapters of jurisprudence); and Daʿif al-Jamiʿ (the weak narrations of the Compendium) is in a single volume. All are published by al-Maktab al-Islami.
(3) Here Shaykh Nasir is referring to his own “Sahih,” but later the Arab Bureau of Education for the Gulf States commissioned him to grade Sunan Abi Dawud. I abridged its chains of transmission and issued it as Sahih Sunan Abi Dawud – Mukhtasar al-Isnad. The same was done for the remaining Sunan collections after Shaykh Nasir changed his view and no longer regarded them as his personal compositions.