Preface to the book Repelling the Aggressor Who Encroached upon al-Albani (1) by Tariq ibn ʿAwad Allah ibn Muhammad …
(8) I have also listened to a most valuable lecture by our esteemed brother, the versatile preacher Shaykh Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ al-Munajjid—may Allah preserve him—entitled “Dramatic Events in the Life of the Scholar al-Albani,” recorded on two cassette tapes. The material they contain makes them a primary source for the Shaykh’s biography.
The manner in which he delivered the lecture was excellent.
The tapes present vignettes of the Shaykh’s scrupulous piety, his resolve, his tireless pursuit of knowledge, his worship, his gentleness, his weeping out of fear of Allah (2), his expectation of reward, his debates, his humor, his generosity, and his open-handedness, and they include matters not found in any of the previous sources.
Among their contents are his remarks about the Shaykh’s students, whom he places in three tiers; consult them for further detail.
(1) It seems that most of that work is drawn from al-Shaybani’s Hayat al-Albani; the author points out the exact places he relied on. I have also come across three recent booklets: the first is Safahat bayda min hayat al-Imam Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani ("White Pages from the Life of Imam Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani"), together with Qatf al-thimar bi-akhir ma haddatha bihi shaykhuna al-Albani min akhbar ("Gathering the Fruit: the Last Reports Related by Our Shaykh al-Albani"), both by Atiyya b. Sidqi Ali; the second is Safahat mushriqa min hayat shaykhina al-Albani wa-dawruhu fi al-difaʿ ʿan al-hadith al-nabawi wa-taʼsil al-manhaj al-salafi ("Illuminating Pages from the Life of Our Shaykh al-Albani and His Role in Defending Prophetic Hadith and Establishing the Salafi Methodology"), by Ibrahim Khalil al-Hashimi; and the third is Muhaddith al-asr al-ʿallama Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani ("The Hadith Scholar of the Age, the Erudite Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani"), by Samir b. Amin al-Zuhairi. Many articles that have appeared in newspapers and magazines—especially Islamic periodicals—are, as far as I can tell, not cited. Our brother Nur al-Din Talib lists a number of them at the end of Maqalat al-Albani (pp. 173–243). A brief biography of the Shaykh is also included in the introduction to the Sunan al-Arbaʿa edition published by Bayt al-Afkar al-Dawliyya.
(2) The lecturer—may Allah preserve him—emphasized here that the severity and harshness sometimes attributed to the Shaykh in his rebuttals were not his predominant manner, and he supported this claim with several incidents from the Shaykh’s life.