To proceed: with Allah’s permission and His enabling grace I have resolved to publish a series of articles that present sound hadiths drawn from a wide range of chapters, sections, issues, and beneficial points. I do so in response to the request of many of our esteemed brothers and friends, and so that our honoured readers may benefit from them, cooperating with them in cultivating a sound Islamic culture whose only source, after the Noble Qur’an, is the hadiths of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. They are, in truth—as one of the righteous scholars said⦗1⦘—
“The most blessed, the finest, and the most useful of all branches of knowledge for both religion and worldly life, after the Book of Allah, are the hadiths of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ; for they abound in prayers upon him, and they are like meadows and orchards in which every kind of good, righteousness, virtue, and remembrance is found.”
Yet it is greatly regrettable that into these meadows and orchards some parasitical growths of weak and fabricated hadiths have crept, until they have flourished there; with the passage of time and the ignorance of most people as to their true nature, they have come to seem an integral part of the original garden. This is what has driven me to try to purify the garden from such intruders and to warn heedless Muslims about them. I have done so through a series of essays entitled “Weak and Fabricated Hadiths and Their Harmful Impact on the Ummah,” which are being published successively in the illustrious journal Al-Tamaddun al-Islami. Scholars and people of virtue from many lands have welcomed these essays with satisfaction and acceptance, have been keen to obtain and preserve them, and many have hastened to subscribe to the journal because of them.