upon following the sunnah, owing either to ignorance of it or heedlessness of it—except for those whom Allah wills, and how few they are. Al-Nawawi, may Allah have mercy on him, said in his Commentary on Muslim: “This hadith establishes one of the etiquettes of prayer: the sunnah is that the follower should not bend down for prostration until the imam has placed his forehead upon the ground, unless he knows from the imam’s manner that, were he to delay until that point, the imam would rise from prostration before he himself had prostrated. Our scholars, may Allah Most High have mercy on them, said: This hadith and others, taken together, indicate that it is sunnah for the follower to lag slightly behind the imam, beginning the pillar after the imam has begun it but before he has completed it.”

The other reason is that I found a new source for this hadith which I had not previously come across; indeed, I had regarded it as lost. It is Imam al-Tabarani’s al-Mu'jam al-Awsat. I wished to acquaint the esteemed readers with it by citing it as a source, in the hope that someone among them who shares our interest in this field and has some spare time may strive to critically edit it and bring it into print (1). For it is exceedingly rich in material: “It contains every valuable, rare, and rejected report,” as al-Dhahabi said in his biography of al-Tabarani in al-Tadhkirah.

The Islamic University in Medina had it photographically reproduced, and from it I obtained a paper photocopy while on my way to Hajj last year, 1399 AH. May Allah reward those responsible with goodness. I am now engaged in numbering its hadiths and compiling indexes for it, and have completed the latter, praise be to Allah. They are four:

1. An alphabetical index of its narrators among the Companions, numbering nearly six hundred; alongside each name are the numbers of his hadiths, thereby making clear which of them narrated few reports and which narrated many.