5 - Ibn Rajab’s Commentary on al-Nawawī’s Forty Hadith: Innovation and Audience in the Jāmiʿ al-ʿulūm wa-l-ḥikam

Summary

Introduction

The ‘forty hadith’ genre is without doubt one of the most well-known and popular genres in Muslim scholarship, past and present. Hadith scholars, jurists, Sufis, historians and littérateurs alike produced such countless collections over the course of the history of Muslim societies. The total number of forty hadith collections might never be fully known, although some have tried to establish their precise number. The printed editions of collections as well as those that were produced in the modern period are already difficult to quantify; and this is in addition to the unknown number of unedited collections (availability aside) that are hidden in manuscript collections around the world.

The fact that there are countless forty hadith collections on a wide array of topics from the second/eighth century onward in almost all parts of the Muslim world makes the genre much more than just one of the many kinds of hadith-related texts. We could even say that this genre is a transdisciplinary vehicle to express theological opinions on specific topics and relate them to, and therefore legitimise them, through prophetic traditions. The topics of the collections are almost as numerous as the number of compilations. Bartschat lists collections that seem to have no clear topic (these are usually entitled aḥādīth nabawiyya) and collections on, for instance, mysticism (taṣawwuf), asceticism (zuhd), poverty and the poor (faqr wa-fuqarāʾ), the remembrance (dhikr) of God, moral life, law, societal issues, medicine, fear and hope, gratitude, theology and eschatology.

Among the many collections of forty hadiths, the forty hadith collection of Abū Zakariyyā Yaḥyā al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277) is by far the most popular. As Jonathan Brown states, this collection is ‘one of the most widely read books after the Quran among Sunni Muslims’. Al-Nawawī compiled forty-two narrations on the principles of the religion, narrations that played and continue to play a significant role in the education of Muslims. Its significance is reflected in the many manuscript copies and the numerous contemporary editions.

But ordinary people were not the only ones who studied and memorised the prophetic traditions in this collection and acknowledged al-Nawawī's scholarly acumen in his selection of the hadith. Many scholars, past and present, were also interested in this collection.