Introductions

In the name of Allah, the Most Merciful, the Bestower of Mercy

Foreword by: Zuhayr al-Shawish

All praise is due to Allah for His bounties. Blessings and peace be upon the Teacher of goodness, our master Muhammad, and upon his family. May Allah be pleased with his Companions and those scholars of piety who followed them, who conveyed to us this upright religion free of every falsification and distortion, who acquainted us with the attributes of our Lord in a manner befitting His majesty, beauty, and perfection, and who clarified for us the avenues of creed, the path of worship, the establishment of justice, and the adornment of noble character and refined speech. We ask Allah to make us among those who uphold all of that in all our states and utterances until we meet Him while He is pleased with us.

To proceed:

During his tenure at al-Maktab al-Islami in 1391 AH, I requested the hadith scholar Shaykh Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani—may Allah preserve him—to trace and document the hadiths of al-Hafiz al-Dhahabi’s book “al-ʿUlū” as part of a series of works on creed. He accepted, proposing to omit certain reports that were repeated, weak, or singular for reasons he explained and with which I agreed. Thus it came to be, as you will find in his introduction on pages 5–6.

The brothers in the proofreading department in Damascus copied the manuscript, the printed original, and the Shaykh’s notes, assisting him with collation and correction.

When printing the book in Damascus proved impossible, it was sent to me in Beirut, where I prepared it for the press by retyping it. I set the main text in a larger font and the documentation in a smaller one, so that the courteous reader may readily discern the grade of each hadith and the corresponding comment in the documentation.