—people to whom the old saying aptly applies: “He wanted to be raisins before the grapes had even ripened.” They are, first of all, ignorant of this science; second, they pay no heed whatsoever to the scholars—past or present—who do know it; and, third, they often harbor a deep-seated malice and a ruinous self-admiration. One of them seems to be proclaiming, as the colloquial expression goes, “O earth, brace yourself, for none is heavier upon you than I!”

Before me at this moment lies a slim booklet entitled The Weak Hadiths in the “Series of Authentic Hadiths,” written by one Ramadan Maḥmūd ʿĪsā and published by Dār al-Fikr, Khartoum. From the present volume of the Series he has taken issue with twelve hadiths. I have found nothing in his critique that displays sound knowledge or understanding; he merely chews over a few scholarly principles on which he leans, though he has neither grasped nor properly understood them.

His method is to quote my words and my documentation of a hadith, then to append—under the heading “Commentary”—an ignorant, whim-driven objection, followed by his crude verdict that the hadith is weak. The shape of his objection varies with the type of hadith in question:
• At times he declares a reliable transmitter weak because someone once said, “He reports oddities from so-and-so” (p. 17). In the terminology of the scholars this is not an outright judgment of weakness; it is certainly not equivalent to the label “his hadith is rejected.”
• At other times he is unaware that a Companion’s statement, “Such-and-such is part of the sunnah,” carries the legal force of a marfūʿ report (p. 34). On that basis he declared hadith no. 229 weak, giving no weight at all to the fact that the Companions themselves acted upon it—an unmistakable sign of his profound ignorance and of his scant appreciation for the praise