one of which nearly proved fatal. But Allah kept us safe, and we suffered no bodily harm whatsoever. Praise be to Allah, by Whose grace righteous deeds are brought to completion.
Despite the continuing conditions we have described in Beirut, Brother Zuhayr—may Allah preserve him—was afforded the welcome opportunity to print the hadith documentation. He promptly did so, publishing it separately from its original work, The Lawful and the Prohibited, as you can see. Perhaps he was unable to do otherwise, and “Allah does not burden any soul beyond its capacity.” Whatever Allah, Blessed and Exalted, chooses is best.
Two important matters must be pointed out here:
The first is that the hadith documentation printed in the margins of the book was prepared solely by its author—may Allah Most High preserve him—and is not my work. Although concise in presentation, it follows the method of most writers to which I previously referred: it authenticates reports only rarely and does not declare them weak. This differs from my own method, whose distinguishing feature is that the documentation is invariably accompanied by a statement of the hadith’s grade, as is well known from all my books and hadith-documentation works, including this one. Praise be to Allah; to Him belong all bounty and favor.
The reason for this clarification is that one reader personally questioned me about some of what appeared in Dr. al-Qaradāwī’s hadith documentation. He assumed that it was mine, yet knew that it contradicted some of my published hadith-documentation works, which left him confused. When I explained that it was not mine, his confusion disappeared. Other readers must undoubtedly have encountered the same difficulty, so it was necessary to resolve it in this introduction.
This mistaken assumption arose from certain phrases in The Lawful. In the introduction to the fourth edition (p. 8), the author—may Allah preserve him—wrote:
“The hadith scholar of the Levant, Nāsir al-Dīn al-Albānī, is tracing the hadiths contained in this book to their sources, so that this documentation may be added to the valuable volume to be published by the Islamic Office....”
Taken at face value, this gives the impression to which I referred above. That misleading impression became even stronger when the passage in the fifth edition (also p. 8) was revised to read: