Twelfth Note
On page 138 the author quotes the sound ḥadīth, “O Allah, I seek refuge in You from al-mātham and al-maghram,” and then states in a marginal note that al-maghram means “sins and acts of disobedience.”
I maintain that this interpretation is extremely weak. It was mentioned only by Ibn al-Athīr in al-Nihāyah and, following him, by Ibn Manẓūr in Lisān al-ʿArab; as far as I know, no other leading lexicographer endorsed it, nor did Ibn al-Athīr himself repeat it in his Jāmiʿ al-Uṣūl. According to this feeble view, al-mātham and al-maghram would carry the same meaning, rendering the conjunction between them pointless, whereas coordination is normally used to indicate a difference.
The correct position is that al-maghram here refers to al-gharam, namely debt. Al-Jawharī writes: “Al-gharāmah is what one is obliged to pay, and the same applies to al-maghram and al-gharam.”
Ibn al-Athīr says in Jāmiʿ al-Uṣūl: “Al-maghram is when a person undertakes an obligation that was not originally his—such as standing surety for someone else’s debt and then paying it.”
Al-Rāghib al-Aṣfahānī states: “Al-gharam is the loss that befalls a person’s property without any wrongdoing; one says, ‘He incurred such-and-such gharman or maghraman.’”
Al-Nawawī, in his commentary on Muslim, writes: “Al-maghram means al-gharam, that is, debt.”
Ibn Ḥajar, in Fatḥ al-Bārī, says: “Al-maghram is debt; it is said gharima—with the rāʾ pronounced with kasrah—meaning, ‘he incurred debt’… The Prophet sought refuge from being overwhelmed by debt.”
I add: In the very ḥadīth of which Shaykh al-Albānī cited a portion there is clear evidence that al-maghram means debt, for in the two Ṣaḥīḥs and in the Sunan of Abū Dāwūd and al-Nasāʾī, from ʿĀʾishah