Silsilat al-Ahadith al-Sahiha wa-Shay' min Fiqhiha wa-Fawa'idiha

Silsilat al-Ahadith al-Sahiha wa-Shay' min Fiqhiha wa-Fawa'idiha ("The Series of Sound Hadiths, with Something of their Fiqh and Benefits") is the work of Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani, collecting hadiths that he judges sound or good, with their documentation and a discussion of their chains. ³ Maktabat al-Ma'arif of Riyadh published it in successive volumes, with the hadiths numbered continuously. ⁴

Al-Albani wrote the preface to the first edition in Damascus on 14/12/1378 AH. ³ He explains there that he had been publishing articles in the journal al-Tamaddun al-Islami titled "Weak and fabricated hadiths and their harmful effect on the community", warning against reports he considered weak or fabricated that had entered the hadith literature and come to seem part of it. ⁵ He then concluded that warning against weak reports was not enough on its own, since knowing the weak does not entail knowing the sound, and the weak cannot be counted — by a later edition's addition, he had passed 6,500 — so he resolved to present the sound beside the weak, combining "a description of the disease and the offer of the cure", in his words. ³

• He followed no chapter order, publishing hadiths as they came to hand, as he had in the "Weak" series. ³
• His first aim was to establish the soundness of the hadiths and discuss their chains, routes and narrators in the manner of the hadith scholars and within their terminology, as briefly as possible. ³
• He sometimes discusses questions of fiqh and points of language, and sometimes links hadiths with connecting remarks into a self-contained topic suitable as the basis for a sermon or lecture, without committing himself to doing so. ³

Al-Albani opens volume 1 with a section he titles "The future belongs to Islam", arguing that the promise of Islam's prevailing over all religion has so far been fulfilled only in part, and presenting hadiths he reads as foretelling its spread. ⁶ Among them:

• The report of 'Abd Allah b. 'Amr that the Prophet ﷺ was asked which of two cities would be conquered first, Constantinople or Rumiya, and said: "The city of Heraclius will be conquered first." Al-Albani reports that 'Abd al-Ghani al-Maqdisi called its chain good and that al-Hakim declared it sound with al-Dhahabi agreeing — "and it is as they said"; he holds that the first conquest came about at the hands of Mehmed the Conqueror more than eight hundred years later, and that the second — Rumiya, which is Rome — will come in his view. ⁷ See the conquest of Constantinople in 857 AH.
• Hudhayfa's report of the stages of rule: prophethood, then a caliphate on the method of prophethood, then biting kingship, then coercive kingship, then a caliphate on the method of prophethood again. Al-Albani judges Habib b. Salim's report good at the least, and thinks it unlikely to refer to 'Umar b. 'Abd al-'Aziz, since his caliphate came too soon after the Rightly Guided Caliphate. ⁸

Al-Albani wrote the preface to the new edition of volume 1 in Amman on the evening of Friday 8 Rajab 1413 AH, saying it offered new benefits, many new verifications and replies to those he regarded as trespassers on the discipline. ^{15 16} He sets out the positions of three critics, with sharply polemical language about them; the museum describes it here without reproducing his characterisations.

Not covered here: the critics' own books, and academic views of al-Albani's method; what is set out above is al-Albani's account of them.

In the preface al-Albani turns to questions of creed: he defends Ibn Khuzayma and his Kitab al-Tawhid against the claim that he regretted writing it, saying that what al-Bayhaqi's al-Asma' wa-al-Sifat contains — if the story is sound — is Ibn Khuzayma's admission that he was not skilled in kalam. ¹⁷ He argues for affirming God's elevation (al-'uluw), citing the hadith of the slave-girl ("Where is God?"), authenticated by Muslim and others, and sees its weakening by al-Kawthari, al-Ghumari and their followers as departing from the judgements of the hadith imams. ¹⁸ These are al-Albani's positions on questions disputed among Sunnis — the hadith scholars, the Ash'aris and the Maturidis — and are given here as his.