“Beware of relating anything from me except what you are sure of.” (1)
If he ﷺ forbade the narration of weak reports, then it is even more obvious that he forbade acting on them.
Accordingly, I have titled this book: “The Prophet’s Prayer Described—from the opening takbīr to the closing salām, as though you were watching it.”
I have arranged it in two tiers, an upper and a lower.
The first tier functions as the core text: in it I set out the ḥadith texts themselves—or the essential clauses drawn from them—placing each in its proper place and weaving the narrations together so that the book reads as a coherent whole from beginning to end. I have been careful to preserve the exact wording of each ḥadith as it appears in the books of sunnah. When a report has multiple wordings, I select one of them if that best serves the composition or some other benefit; at times I add a different wording, indicating this with the phrase, “In another wording: …,” or, “In another narration: ….” I have only rarely attributed the reports to their Companion narrators, and I have generally omitted naming the ḥadith scholars who collected them, so as to facilitate reading and reference.