Preliminary Remarks on the Research Methodology

Praise be to Allah for His bounty, gracious favor, and beautiful beneficence—a praise befitting the majesty of His Countenance and the greatness of His sovereignty. O Allah, bestow Your blessings and peace upon Muhammad and his family. To proceed:

I shall now set before the reader the methodology of this study. I first state each heading and define it so as to remove any obscurity. I then present evidence from the Quran or Sunnah, a report from the early Muslims, or a rational explanation of its meaning; this last method is used only rarely.

I have observed a group of authors in the field of treatment—if that is the right expression—who, judging by the abundance of their writings, consider issue-specific ijtihād permissible. On this matter they adopt the majority position, yet they depart from the majority by adducing weak and fabricated reports as evidence, or at the very least by relating them without distinguishing what is spurious. I have seen many of them cite reports and tales akin to beasts strangled, bludgeoned, killed by a fall, or gored, along with other material on which no one who had so much as once caught the scent of knowledge in his life would rely. How many an author is a gatherer of firewood by night and a flood sweeping everything before it—unable to distinguish the authentic from the weak and imagining every round object to be a loaf of bread! (1)

To my mind, no likeness fits such people except this harsh proverb: “A bereaved mother is not like a hired mourner.” Had the matter truly concerned them, they would have put themselves to the trouble of researching, selecting, and critically examining the material. I therefore set about collecting the transmission routes of the hadiths reported concerning the evil eye, envy, and commendable emulation—indeed, everything relevant to the issue—and critically assessed them according to the scholarly principles of hadith terminology and the methodology of the early hadith scholars. I distinguished the spurious from the authentic and sometimes treated certain points at length—namely, those lying at the very heart of the subject—despite the scarcity of sources, my distance from centers of learning, and preoccupation